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On a recent Ramsey Show segment, a caller named Todd admitted he had run up credit card debt buying Pokemon cards he planned to flip for profit. Dave Ramsey did not soften the diagnosis. “Here you are. $13,426 of stupid. I wanna define my stupid very carefully and thoroughly.”
The stakes here are not abstract. Todd financed a speculative side hustle with the most expensive money a household can borrow. The average credit card APR sits at 21.00% as of February 1, 2026, in what the Federal Reserve data classifies as record territory (post-2023). If you borrow at that rate to chase an asset that has never paid you a dollar, the math is not close. It is a guaranteed loss compounding against a…