Calling Financial Bull$hit

A new series from Making of a Millionaire

Photo by Jametlene Reskp on Unsplash

Before COVID, personal finance & investing were not mainstream topics of daily discourse online.

But when the world shut down in 2020, money and finances became top of mind for everyone. On the one hand, it’s good that people are taking an interest in how they can better manage their money.

On the other hand, this has coincided with the rise of “finfluncer”—Online creators who cashed in on the interest in personal finance to make a buck from giving their takes on money and investing.

The problem? Many of these people have no clue what they are talking about but still want to sell you courses on how to invest or manage money.

We live in a world where people associate the number of followers a person has with credibility. Sadly, the opposite is often true—those with the loudest voices and the most controversial opinions draw the most attention and have the most followers.

Anybody who has seen the financial advice being dished out on TikTok knows what I am talking about.

The mission of this publication will always be this:

To help you use money to live your best life.

A key part of the mission is to help you identify Financial Bull$shit when you see it, understand what makes it Bull$hit advice, and show you what the data and research says about what actually works when it comes to managing money.

I am excited to share with you the launch of the newest ongoing series from Making of a Millionaire, which I’ve named “Calling Financial Bull$shit!”

In each post, I will look at particular personal finance topics and review what the research says is the optimal way to make decisions and compare that to trending advice and make a determination if popular personal finance advice you read online is Bull$hit, legit, or somewhere in between.

The goal of the series is to help you make better financial decisions and avoid getting scammed.

To be clear, not all popular financial advice is Bull$hit, and not everything economists say about the “Rational” approach to personal finance works in the real world.

I feel uniquely suited for the task of weighing the advice of personal finance gurus and economists, as I have spent my entire adult life in the world of economic research while moonlighting as a personal finance author. I have a foot planted firmly in each camp.

We’ll cover topics on anything to do with money, from investing, real estate, retirement, and homeownership—Anything that has to do with money will have some Bull$hit advice you need to avoid.

As always, I will try to make as many of these articles free for everyone, but the only way to access the (very quickly growing) archive of content is to become a paid subscriber.

Stay tuned for the first entry in Calling Financial Bull$hit coming soon!

Cheers,

Ben