Dave Ramsey’s firm fired employees over sex outside of marriage — but only sometimes: lawsuit

Evangelical Christian money guru Dave Ramsey has a simple approach to saving and living that just got complicated.

The company founded and run by Ramsey, a household name despite having no formal financial planning credentials, is being sued after firing nine employees for having sex out of wedlock. Its response, court documents show: “core values” laid out in a corporate doctrine that mirrors Ramsey’s Christian ethos don’t allow premarital or extramarital sex.

Except, lawyers for one fired employee assert in court papers filed last month, for some privileged individuals.

The legal drama, laid bare in a lawsuit filed last year against Ramsey Solutions by a former administrative assistant who alleges that she was fired because she became pregnant while unmarried, brings to the fore the religious center of Ramsey’s empire, which does business with an estimated 1,400 financial advisors. Some work at RIAs and broker-dealers like LPL Financial, Raymond James, Edelman Financial Engines and TD Ameritrade, according to their LinkedIn profiles.

Ramsey’s composite approach to investing and life puts a spin on the trend of holistic planning, in which an advisor incorporates a client’s personal values and their financial goals. His outsize fan base of millions of followers of his talk-radio shows, best-selling books, Youtube shows and seminars has made ripe picking for advisors seeking like-minded clients — or other clients. While his core constituency is mass-market consumers and those struggling with debt, particularly millennials, his ties to mainstream RIAs and other advisors gives him a broader reach.

Ramsey claims 20 million weekly listeners for his two radio shows, as well as three million YouTube subscribers, six million “graduates” of his “Financial Peace University” and 19 “national best-selling books.” He loathes debt, except for mortgages, and frequently quotes proverbs from the Bible, such as “The rich rule over the poor, and the borrower is slave to the lender,” in the same breath as dispensing money advice.

www.daveramsey.com

Monthly fees for access to potential clients
Under Ramsey’s SmartVestor Pro marketing service, advisors pay a monthly fee to be paired with potential clients who visit Ramsey’s website in search of “financial advisors, wealth advisors, financial planners and other investing professionals” in their area. “These are the people we trust to take care of you and your investments,” the website says. Many SmartVestor advisors tout their links to Ramsey on their own websites.

The company says that more than 42,000 advisors, realtors, accountants and insurance salespeople pay for the SmartVestor affiliation, but won’t disclose how many of those are financial advisors. EDGE Investment Solutions, a firm in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, that sells advisory services through RIA Cambridge Investment Research Advisors, counts more than 1,400.

Ramsey Solutions, also known as Lampo Group and based in Franklin, Tennessee, doesn’t publicly reveal the size of the fees. Michael Nelan, the owner and founder of Nelan Financial & Insurance Services in Fair Oaks, California, says he pays $1,399 a month but that rates vary by geography, with advisors in nearby Stockton, California, paying $950. “It’s not cheap,” he says of the lead-prospecting service -, adding that the fee covers referrals to clients who visit Ramsey’s website, as well as “coaching.”

A SmartVestor Pro advisor signs a “code of conduct” in which they acknowledge they are “familiar and generally agree[s] with Ramsey Solutions’ mission and personal finance principles of its products and services.” Still, Nelan says that “the Christian thing” is “not even a blip” for most advisors.

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SmartVestor’s code doesn’t mention a fiduciary standard, in which an advisor must act in a client’s best interest. Ramsey’s company has come under scrutiny for prior practices in which the precursor of SmartVestor Pro, Endorsed Local Providers (ELP), was found by Missouri regulators in 2016 to be violating state laws by not registering as “an investment advisor, investment adviser representative, broker-dealer, broker-dealer agent, or issuer agent,” according to a consent order.

Ramsey Solutions was sued last July by Caitlin O’Connor, an administrative assistant. In a complaint filed in a Tennessee district court, O’Connor alleges that she was terminated in June 2020 when the company told her that she had violated its “righteous living” policy by becoming pregnant while unmarried. An amended complaint filed on February 10 alleges violation of the Family and Medical Leave Act, Civil Rights Act and Americans with Disabilities Act as well as related Tennessee laws.

O’Connor, who had worked at the company for four years, requested maternity leave and other paperwork on June 18, 2020, from human resources, when she was 12 weeks pregnant, court papers show. The ADA rules applied, she argues in her suit, because she was over age 35 and thus undergoing a “geriatric pregnancy.” “I understand that being unmarried and expecting is frowned upon here, but the reality of the situation is this is what I’m walking through right now,” she wrote in an email to supervisors.

One week later, after a meeting with two company board members and the head of HR, she was fired for “violating” Ramsey Solutions’ “Company Conduct” rules. Those rules, court papers show, say that “The image of Ramsey Solutions is held out to be Christian. Should a team member engage in behavior not consistent with traditional Judeo-Christian values or teaching, it would damage the image and the value of our good will and our brand. If this should occur, the team member would be subject to review, probation, or termination.”

Lawyers for the company argue in a February 23 filing that while O’Connor was an employee-at-will and that while prohibitions against premarital sex are uncommon, “they are not illegal.” Court papers show the company had fired another eight people — five men and three women — since 2016 for that very reason.

Asked how the company, which employs nearly 1,000 people, knew that O’Connor and the others had engaged in pre-marital sex, Heather Collins, a lawyer for O’Connor, says that “they seem to make it their business to look into people’s personal lives. Water cooler talk is really how it goes down. Somebody talks about something in an innocent manner, then they follow up with the employee on ‘what they did over the weekend.”

‘Selective’ about who can violate conduct rules and keep their job
The problem, Collins says, is that while some other employees appear to have engaged in extramarital affairs, they weren’t fired. “They say anyone who has premarital or extramarital sex will be terminated as a matter of policy, and that’s not the case. Some are, some aren’t. They seem to be selective.”

Ramsey Solutions and Leslie Sanders, a lawyer for the company, did not return repeated calls requesting comment.

The lawsuit alleges that the “selectivity” applied to the number-two ranking person at Ramsey’s empire, Chris Hogan. A March 3 email from a lawyer for Ramsey Solutions to Collins said that Hogan had engaged in extramarital sex but had not been fired, and that the company would turn over internal files documenting the case. Reached by telephone, Chris Hogan declined to comment.

On March 10, Hogan, a radio and social media personality in his own right with a trademark baritone voice, surprised Ramsey followers by announcing, without giving reasons, on Youtube that he was leaving the company. Hogan’s ex-wife, Melissa, detailed in an earlier blog post how the company had known since at least December 2018 that her husband had been cheating. Ramsay Solutions, she said, organized the then-couple’s marriage counselor, personal therapists and a “church elder” to report back to the company “in real time” on how reconciliation was proceeding — a process she called “controlling” and “spiritually manipulative.” Reached by telephone, Melissa Hogan says that “everything I have to say is on my blog” and her social media channels.

Brant Spesshardt, a CFP and CKA (“Certified Kingdom Advisor”), a credential for advisors with Christian values, in Raleigh, North Carolina, says that he doesn’t know if the drama will taint the SmartVestor Pro brand. But, he adds, “I want to be prepared if someone has questions or thoughts.” Asked if he followed Ramsey’s Code of Conduct, he declined to answer and referred all questions to Ramsay Solutions.

Nelan, the SmartVestor advisor, says that while “sometimes we get clients with hundreds of thousands of dollars,” he keeps the Ramsey affiliation “to try to help people.” Asked if clients might be put off by the legal drama, he says, “it’s disappointing — I’m not gonna lie.”