This is the Ramsey Call of the Day, part of the Ramsey Network.

Joining me today is Ramsey personality, Ken Coleman.

Today's question comes from Thomas in Missouri.

As a Christian, I feel like I have a duty to take care of my employees.

I have a small business with nine employees.

They currently make minimum wage.

If I were to raise their wages to a living wage, then my profit margin would decrease.

This is a business I worked really hard at for so many years.

I think God would want me to benefit from my hard work now.

What should I do?

Okay. This is an onion here, Dave. Number one,

businesses deal with this all the time. And when they raise wages, they have a decision to make.

Do you want your profit margin to stay the same? And so, if so, then you have to raise your costs.

And you have to weigh that with the marketplace and what your customers will or will not pay.

And this is the dance that a lot of small business people have to deal with and have had to deal with and have been heard from it.

So I don't think it's a choice here between God wants

you to benefit from your hard work now and, you know, not doing what you want to do, which

is pay your employees more. I think you can do both, but you're going to have to square

raising some prices or cutting costs in other areas, if that's even an option.

This is hard to answer.

I want to say that everything I just said, it's very difficult to answer that via a static

question where we can't answer a lot of questions.

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