Dave Ramsey's blunt advice: 'Shut up and invest' — the real reason most Canadians aren't building wealth

On a recent episode of The Ramsey Show, the personal finance guru addressed a caller named Dylan who questioned why he recommends splitting retirement savings across four types of mutual funds rather than simply buying an S&P 500 index fund.

Ramsey’s answer wasn’t really about which fund is better. It was about a far bigger problem.

‘100% of people who invest end up with more money’

Ramsey acknowledged that fewer than half of individual mutual funds in the growth sector outperform the market over time — a point that Canadian data has confirmed repeatedly. According to the SPIVA Canada Year-End 2025 Scorecard, published by S&P Dow Jones Indices, 93.4% of Canadian equity active funds underperformed the S&P/TSX Composite Index that year. Over a 10-year horizon, 98.8% of active Canadian equity funds failed to beat their benchmark.

But Ramsey’s core argument wasn’t about active versus passive. It was about the cost of doing nothing while the debate drags on.

“You got a lot of people that have an opinion out there that have no stinking money,” Ramsey said. “100% of the people who invest end up with more money than those who don’t every time.”

He cited Vanguard founder John Bogle as evidence that long-term market outperformance by active fund managers is the exception and not the rule. But he also argued that investors who choose actively managed funds that have demonstrated long-term success — a mix of large-cap, mid-cap, small-cap and international growth funds — can still outperform a simple index strategy by a modest margin. (And investors can use mutual funds or exchange-traded funds (ETFs) to create those four investment buckets.)

Whether you agree with that or not, Ramsey’s central point is hard to argue with: A small difference in returns between funds is irrelevant if you never actually invest.

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The millionaire next to you probably didn’t overthink it

Ramsey pointed to research from Ramsey Solutions’ National Study of Millionaires, a survey of more than 10,000 U.S. millionaires, to make his case. The findings were striking: 8 out of 10 millionaires built their wealth through their workplace retirement plan. Most were not financial geniuses. Most were not high earners. And many picked a fund to invest in simply because a colleague suggested it. While these findings are not peer-reviewed, they paint an interesting picture of how everyday citizens reach a seven-figure net worth without being financial tycoons.

“A lot of millionaires are just regular people who picked out their mutual fund based on what the guy in the cubicle next to them was doing,” Ramsey said. The key, he stressed, is that they were investing — not just talking about it.

For Canadians, this lesson lands with particular weight. A 2025 Retirement Survey conducted by the Healthcare of Ontario Pension Plan (HOOPP) found that 49% of Canadians have not set aside any money for retirement in the past year, and 39% have never saved for retirement at all.

Meanwhile, a separate poll from Edward Jones Canada, released in February 2026, found that only 41% of Canadians plan to contribute to their Registered Retirement Savings Plan (RRSP). Additionally, 70% of Canadians report having negative feelings about RRSP contributions, with confusion being the most common emotion (40%). Other respondents felt unsure about maximizing their RRSP opportunities correctly (37%) or worried they are not contributing enough for a financially secure retirement (36%).

On top of that, BMO’s Annual Retirement Survey, also released in early 2026, found 74% of Canadians worry they will not have enough money in retirement because of rising prices. Of those who said inflation was eroding their financial security, 31% admitted to actively contributing less to their retirement savings as a result.

The gap between worrying about retirement and actually investing for it is exactly what Ramsey is calling out.

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Is it time to stop searching for the ‘perfect’ portfolio?

The Canadian investment landscape offers the same basic choice that Ramsey describes: actively managed mutual funds, passively managed index funds or exchange-traded funds (ETFs), or asset allocation funds that do the balancing for you.

For Canadian investors looking to track the S&P 500 — one of the benchmarks Ramsey has long cited for its strong long-term returns — several low-cost options trade directly on the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX). As of year-end 2025, the Vanguard S&P 500 Index ETF (TSX: VFV) and the BMO S&P 500 Index ETF (TSX: ZSP), for example, both carry management expense ratios below 0.10% and have posted five-year annualized returns of around 15.8% in Canadian dollar terms, according to Morningstar Canada.

For investors who want broad exposure to Canadian equities, the iShares Core S&P/TSX Capped Composite Index ETF (TSX: XIC) returned 16.03% over the last five years as of year-end 2025.