"Just live within your means" is bad, bullshit advice

Yesterday I made a video about how everyone you know is in debt, as I predicted, even though I asked people to not do it in the comments. A bunch of people who are seemingly very good at finance, but not good at comprehension, couldn't wait to jump into the comments and tell me how they're not in debt. The version of the comment that was most upsetting and the least helpful was the ones saying, "I've within, I've always done is just live within my means. If I can't afford something, I don't pay for it." And that's dumb advice. That's bad advice for a variety of reasons. Number one is that people who are reading your comments, they don't have a time machine. They can't go back to when they didn't have any debt. And the second thing is that the economy would just collapse. I don't know if you've seen the numbers, but if people just stop spending money on credit cards, we'd literally sink past where we were in the great depression. But so the reason it's so incredibly unhelpful, even that saying, I just live within my means, is untrue. Your means means live within your privileged life. I'll prove it to you. Let's do a fun little scenario. Let's say you're Dave Ramsey Jr. You've just graduated from high school. You're gonna get a job. You get an average job for your age. First of all, you couldn't even afford the average apartment in America. Let's say you get the absolute cheapest, get an apartment close to where you work because you can't have a car. That's fantasy. You already have a car, right? Well, let's not even talk about how you got it. You scrimped and saved to high school. Fine. You've got a car. You don't own anything on it. You have a really cheap apartment. Boom, your transmission goes out. $2,000. What do you do? Imagine two more catastrophic events within six to 12 months. Immediately you're in debt. Your plan goes out the window. Unless you have a net of individuals who could give you money for that. Friends, family, a trusted colleague, you're either incredibly lucky that nothing like that has ever happened to you, or it's only a matter of time. Or you have a financial net of other individuals around you. That's privilege. And if that's you, stay the fuck out of the comments section about conversations about debt.