Episode 387: Lessons from The Wealthy Barber (2025)

This is the Rational Reminder podcast, a weekly reality check on sensible investing and financial decision making from three Canadians. We are hosted by me, Benjamin Felix, chief investment officer, Dan Borlotti, portfolio manager, and Ben Wilson, episode 387. I do wanna say up at the top here that we are recording this on November 17, which is about a month before the episode is actually set to release. We usually record a week in advance so hopefully the world hasn't changed too much over the month since we recorded but today we're going to discuss the main lessons from the 2025 edition of the Wealthy Barber, which is a classic Canadian personal finance book that Dan, I know you and I both read the 2025 edition. Ben, have you read it yet? I haven't read it yet, but I look forward to reading it soon. It's a good book. Many Canadians have read the original, and Dave Chilton, the author, has gone through and fully updated the book, including lots of references to TikTok and ChatGPT, kind of funny, and the content, of course. And we had Dave on in episode 370 of this podcast where we talked about the original book. We talked about a few other things. We talked about what's changed since you wrote that book, and all of those changes, of course, are reflected in the new version of the book. So I have a bunch of notes, basically, just what I thought were the most important points from the book and we're gonna rip through those. But before we jump in there, do you guys have anything else to add? I barely remember reading the first book way back in the early nineties, but a lot of the insights in the book are pretty refreshing. Like, it's not just kind of the cliche personal finance stuff that we hear all the time from everyone. And I think what really shines through in this book is I'm pretty sure Dave has seen inside of more people's personal finances than almost anyone. My understanding is he has tons of people who send him their information and ask for help. And so he's got so much real world insight into where people are doing well, where people are going wrong. And so the advice rings so authentic and so real and not just, you know, somebody sitting at home who hasn't actually talked to an investor or anyone in ten years. It's very fresh. That's what really jumped out when I read it. And that's the thing with Dave is he's, like, he's a great writer, and he's super funny. He had John Campbell on his podcast. I don't know if that episode's out yet, and, hopefully, I'm not spoiling something that he didn't want people to know. I doubt it, though. He introduced John Campbell by naming one of his, like, super technical economics textbooks, and then Dave followed that up with, which as we all …