Are Personal Finance Gurus Giving You Bad Advice? (Update)

Hey there. It's Stephen Dubner. Happy New Year. If you were the kind of person who makes a New Year's resolution, there's a good chance that resolution has to do with your personal finances. This has always struck me as a bit odd since there is no shortage of people out there who give financial advice. So maybe that advice just isn't working? That is a question we set out to explore in 2022 in an episode called, Are Personal Finance Gurus Giving You Bad Advice? We thought it might be a good idea to play it again now. We have updated facts and figures as necessary. I hope it helps. As always, thanks for listening. I've got a question for you today, a personal question. It's about something you may not be so comfortable talking about. Let me give a little background first. Years ago, I was writing a book about the psychology of money. I was going to call it Money Makes Me Happy Except When It Doesn't. But I ended up putting that book in a drawer when I met Steve Levitt, an economist at the University of Chicago, and instead, we wrote Freakonomics. And that's turned out pretty well, but the money curiosity never left me. I've always been intrigued by how we think about money, or maybe more accurately, how we fail to think about money. It is one of those topics like sex and religion and politics that's often driven less by thoughtful consideration and more by emotion. Money is so versatile, so central to our daily decision making that we attach all sorts of emotions to it, excitement, fear, lust, regret. It's hard to name an emotion that doesn't get attached to money. And this can make money hard to talk about, in some cases, even taboo. Today, I'd like to put aside that taboo and start with a simple question. Where do you get advice about money? Here's how some of our other listeners answer that question. I usually get it from YouTube. There's a channel called The Financial Diet that I really enjoy. Mainly through financial podcasts. So, like The Money Guy Show, Afford Anything. Ray Dalio's How the Economic Machine Works. It's a YouTube episode on his channel. I actually started a group with my female friends and colleagues. We call ourselves purse strings. It's kind of a joke. And we meet every one to three months to just talk about financial topics, share our strategies. When you're younger, you get it from parents and friends. As I get older, rely more on financial websites. Honestly, I get all my personal finance advice from my dad because he is almost never wrong with this kind of thing. You'll notice that none of those listeners explicitly said they get their money advice from a CFP, a certified financial planner. Perhaps this isn't surprising. There are roughly a 100,000 CFPs in The US versus a 131,000,000 households. So even though financial advice …