I wish I was joking. 99% of every personal finance blog I’ve ever read sucks.
The big exception is Financial Samurai. I don’t always agree with everything he posts (e.g. for some reason he’s shilling Fundrise, which unequivocally sucks), but it’s high-quality posts and he tries to back up everything with data.
But without naming names (except Dave Ramsey, who I enjoy sh*tting on) almost everything else I’ve read is paltry as hell.
Most Personal Finance is About Going from Lower to Middle Class
That’s swell. Genuinely.
But it does leave two problems:
- What about middle class folks who want to truly excel?
- There’s nothing that inspiring about aspiring to having a mortgage
Imagine telling someone who is in tremendous debt and has no family to rely on that they just need to work 80 hours a week so that one day they’ll only have to work 40 (with the occassional overtime).
That would not inspire me.
Instead, it should be seen as honorable to get rich (when done honorably).
Unless you’re a rent-seeker, you don’t become wealthy without returning equivalent or greater value to the world around you. Those who are wealthy have created value to the world.
Economic value is not the only kind of value, and no one is saying that. Nevertheless, we fall into a trap when we pretend rich = bad.
So Why isn’t there More Personal Finance about Getting Rich?
Because it’s hard. So most people haven’t done it.
It’s also hard to mass-produce media with broadly applicable advice. You can tell 100 people “stop spending money when you’re in debt” and it’ll be true for 90 of them.
You can’t go to 100 and say “spot a market need in your industry, lease a factory/office/retail space, and start iterating new products.” I mean, you can—but maybe one person will actually go for it.
You can talk around upper-class finance (which I try to include) like a cool method only available to people above a certain net worth. But the gritty truth is that you have to create value. No bones about it.
If you’re not adding tremendous value to the world, you don’t deserve to be rich. The end.
The Algorithm Doesn’t Support Niche Finance
Most people are definitionally common. Common people need common advice.
The algorithm (no matter the platform) rewards common/popular interests.
Common advice is shit like “max out your Roth IRA contributions” which, sure, that’ll help most people. But that’s not helping anyone get rich unless you’re Peter Thiel.
But if you’re trying to find uncommon advice, you’ll have to really dig. For that reason, a blog like this will inherently never be mainstream.
If I really wanted to make this a viral phenomenon, I would probably make a TikTok account of me doing rich person flexes (real or not) and then intersperse it with actual finance advice. Maybe I will.
For now, understand this basic truth: uncommon advice will never be easy to find. If you want to get ahead, you must inherently not do what most other people are doing.
The hack around this is getting friends who are collectively getting ahead. Then just do what they’re doing.
Don’t think like anyone else.
