All Personal Finance Experts Are Liars

[lludwig]

A new year usually means New Year resolutions... especially with personal finance. Find out why I don't recommend following personal finance "gurus". Do this instead.

All Personal Finance Experts Are Liars | Larry Ludwig

There's a little secret in personal finance that no "guru" will tell you. Find out what you should do instead of following their advice.

larryludwig.com

I haven't posted here in a while, but in the vein of @MJ DeMarco my latest post I'm sure you guys will enjoy.

 

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[Lyinx]

To be fair, I've read your report, and it is true, just had to say something about the title ​

All Personal Finance Experts Are Liars... I'm guessing that excludes you? ​

Adding to the report:
there are people who are self-employed who are slow-lane (they work $$/hour)
and there are people who work $$/job and find ways to do the job faster (thereby making them more valuable)

if you can find ways to add value, you can have a great business.
Also, in my opinion, you can still be working for a company, but find ways to increase your value to the company (side job work, contract work, piece work, etc...) for the same company, and you might find a way to super grow your new business.

 

[lludwig]

To be fair, I've read your report, and it is true, just had to say something about the title ​

All Personal Finance Experts Are Liars... I'm guessing that excludes you? ​

Adding to the report:
there are people who are self-employed who are slow-lane (they work $$/hour)
and there are people who work $$/job and find ways to do the job faster (thereby making them more valuable)

if you can find ways to add value, you can have a great business.
Also, in my opinion, you can still be working for a company, but find ways to increase your value to the company (side job work, contract work, piece work, etc...) for the same company, and you might find a way to super grow your new business.

While I did review investment products and write articles on personal finance, I never made the site (Investor Junkie) about me. If anything, I purposely made it about the brand.

As I said I wanted to include owning a business but readers wanted nothing to do with that topic. Readers only wanted the "slow lane" approach.

 

[Martzee]

A new year usually means New Year resolutions... especially with personal finance. Find out why I don't recommend following personal finance "gurus". Do this instead.

All Personal Finance Experts Are Liars | Larry Ludwig

There's a little secret in personal finance that no "guru" will tell you. Find out what you should do instead of following their advice.

larryludwig.com

I haven't posted here in a while, but in the vein of @MJ DeMarco my latest post I'm sure you guys will enjoy.

Quote:

"The personal finance experts all say to get rich you need to:

• Open a 401(k)
• Invest in the stock market
• Have 6 months in emergency savings
• Buy a house (since it’s your best investment)
• Save 10% of your income
• Eliminate all debt
• Minimize your expenses

I’ve pretty much summarized every personal finance book ever written. I’ve saved you hours of reading and paying for the books."

No, you didn't. You forgot "get an education, find a good job, work hard for the next 55+ years and you die rich".... LOL. Nice read! I am still laughing.

 

[lludwig]

Quote:

"The personal finance experts all say to get rich you need to:

• Open a 401(k)
• Invest in the stock market
• Have 6 months in emergency savings
• Buy a house (since it’s your best investment)
• Save 10% of your income
• Eliminate all debt
• Minimize your expenses

I’ve pretty much summarized every personal finance book ever written. I’ve saved you hours of reading and paying for the books."

No, you didn't. You forgot "get an education, find a good job, work hard for the next 55+ years and you die rich".... LOL. Nice read! I am still laughing.

Yea good point!

 

[Martzee]

Yea good point!

Another thing that came to my mind - these gurus cannot follow their own path and they cannot recommend anything that would make everybody rich. If everybody got rich, these gurus would have no clients. Fortunately, it is a utopia as there will always be people who need surrogate mothers...

 

[lludwig]

Another thing that came to my mind - these gurus cannot follow their own path and they cannot recommend anything that would make everybody rich. If everybody got rich, these gurus would have no clients. Fortunately, it is a utopia as there will always be people who need surrogate mothers...

I dunno if I agree 100% with this point, but I did note at Tony Robbins events there was a lot of devoted "groupies" that would attend multiple Tony Robbins events.

They were action faking, yet not actually doing anything. I'm all for learning from what others have to say on a topic but at some point, you must DO SOMETHING about your lot in life.

 

[socaldude]

Very few people are capable of thinking on their own and creating a new wealth building philosophy.

Most just repeat what they were “taught”. It’s like MJ’s books. What a coincidence that “gurus” are popping up with similar ideas. And no credit is given.

I try to stay away from the “mainstream collective consciousness”. I don’t want my name on business insider and I could care less what guru is on YouTube or on the front page of a popular website.

 

[The-J]

Personal finance gurus don't talk about entrepreneurship because it's hard, risky, and unattractive. It's either reserved for the super geniuses like Zuckerberg and Jobs, or it's completely unglamorous and reserved for those who weren't smart/lucky enough to get an education, like immigrants or blue collar workers. Everyone else who tries it, therefore, must be a fool who is wasting their time.

Most businesses fail. Most people are bad at entrepreneurship and would have to spend years getting good at it. Most people's social circles don't look favorably on entrepreneurship and consider it a risk that they'd highly advise against. The mentality is that a business can crash but education can never be taken away from you, so that's where you should put your focus (as if education and business were mutually exclusive!)

There is some truth to it though, as MJ outlines in his books. Most businesses, regardless of whether or not they are viable, won't grow to a point where it will let the owner retire. They can't. They're limited. But that's a fault of the business model, not of entrepreneurship.

One interesting thing I've learned is that like 90% of these fears are bullshit and that you CAN rise up out of business failure, even if it's catastrophic.

 

[Martzee]

I dunno if I agree 100% with this point, but I did note at Tony Robbins events there was a lot of devoted "groupies" that would attend multiple Tony Robbins events.

They were action faking, yet not actually doing anything. I'm all for learning from what others have to say on a topic but at some point, you must DO SOMETHING about your lot in life.

My comment had a significant portion of sarcasm in it. I agree with the action part. I had a few friends who have been taking action for years. And they still probably are. But we suffer from that "paralysis" all to a certain extend.
And yes, these guys were taking action! To them visiting those seminars was an action!

 

[Martzee]

Personal finance gurus don't talk about entrepreneurship because it's hard, risky, and unattractive. It's either reserved for the super geniuses like Zuckerberg and Jobs, or it's completely unglamorous and reserved for those who weren't smart/lucky enough to get an education, like immigrants or blue collar workers. Everyone else who tries it, therefore, must be a fool who is wasting their time.

Most businesses fail. Most people are bad at entrepreneurship and would have to spend years getting good at it. Most people's social circles don't look favorably on entrepreneurship and consider it a risk that they'd highly advise against. The mentality is that a business can crash but education can never be taken away from you, so that's where you should put your focus (as if education and business were mutually exclusive!)

There is some truth to it though, as MJ outlines in his books. Most businesses, regardless of whether or not they are viable, won't grow to a point where it will let the owner retire. They can't. They're limited. But that's a fault of the business model, not of entrepreneurship.

One interesting thing I've learned is that like 90% of these fears are bullshit and that you CAN rise up out of business failure, even if it's catastrophic.

spot on... working on a business is hard and fear of failure is strong. It is so easy to go to work every day with the "I don't care" mentality and bitching about an employer paying you 10 bucks an hour...

 

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[Ismail941]

Managing money boils down to 8th grade High school mathematician mentality.

I have paid enough attention to gurus in the past. It’s time killing.

I have Seth Godin and Demarco’s books at my desk. I am happy with it. That’s all I need for my improvement, not waffle/comfort.

 

[Kevin88660]

A new year usually means New Year resolutions... especially with personal finance. Find out why I don't recommend following personal finance "gurus". Do this instead.

All Personal Finance Experts Are Liars | Larry Ludwig

There's a little secret in personal finance that no "guru" will tell you. Find out what you should do instead of following their advice.

larryludwig.com

I haven't posted here in a while, but in the vein of @MJ DeMarco my latest post I'm sure you guys will enjoy.

There are still decent pointers from traditional financial prudence. Work to get an income, start saving, have an emergency fund and do not spend too much on stupid stuffs.

It is not uncommon to have people coming to seek advice on what to do when they are about to get chased out by their landlord while spending their last dime on facebook ads.

The problem with traditional mainstream advice is that they emphasize on cutting expense to do the heavy lifting instead of getting more income.

This is an extremely limiting belief, and many advice sounds retarded when they ask you to “cut a latte to retire early”.

Working for someone is playing defensive to get the industry experience and cash. Working for yourself is to play offensive. When the offensive fails there is always a choice to go back to working (defensive) to get the blood recharged so that one day you can launch an offensive attack again.

 

[Kid]

Industry 260 years old, not today's invention by any means : Poor Richard's Almanack - Wikipedia

 

[icemat]

If they were being truthful, they would say:

• Get a good paying job that can pay your bills (if their topic is only entrepreneurship they may encourage you to skip this step altogether)
• Start side businesses and take measured risks until a business works allowing you to quit your job and focus on the business full time
• One such side business is personal finance education, selling books and making YouTube videos/online courses on how the average person can become rich in 45+ years by investing their money slowly in the stock market or through real estate (bonus points if they bring up the Einstein quote on how compound interest is the 8th wonder of the world, etc.)
• The information is freely available and regurgitated online often but because personal finance is never taught in schools your customer base is large and if you are entertaining enough or a good enough writer/add a new concept that is well received by your audience you can get a good amount of traction
• Profit! (in essence this is how you get in the fast lane by selling the slow lane like MJ says)

 

[MattR82]

My clients in the events industry obviously went down recently so I've taken on a part time sales job.

At the end of the month long induction/training/onboarding they had a financial planner come in and chat to us and actually show us how skipping coffee and avocado toast would make us rich one day if we reinvested it into our superannuation (401k).

He scared the SHIT out of all these people but I managed to squeeze out a chuckle when he pulled out the compound interest from a dollar in 1935 or something graph. People were almost arguing trying to get a consultation spot with him the next day.

It's days like that, that I'm so incredibly thankful to people like Mj and for this forum.