The Growing Problem With Personal Finance YouTuber “Influencers” #Finance

I have some bad news for you… You are probably not going to be rich. Not a particularly positive message to start a CashNews.co on but its something that people need to hear from time to time. Unfortunately, this is not something that most people want to hear, so there is no shortage of

people out there that will tell you exactly the opposite, normally as a way to pitch you some kind of product. Now of course most of you watching know that the YouTube ads saying that you can earn 6 figures in a month by selling on Amazon, Forex trading, or flipping Real Estate are

full of shit. But they still all follow a pretty similar routine, hey, you can get rich as long as you are willing to do XYZ while listening to the advice I give you! Again when it turns out that this advice is something that you have to pay for, most people get wise to the fact that it’s all

just a massive scam. Of course some don’t, which is tragic and there really genuinely should be more done about this, but that’s a story for another time… or a coffeezilla CashNews.co. Instead the focus of this CashNews.co will be on a group of internet guru’s with much more influence, a

much larger following, and much more credibility, the personal Finance personalities. So it’s time to learn how money works and find out why you probably shouldn’t be

learning to work your money like these popular youtubers might suggest. Now I want to preface this by saying that I personally enjoy watching people like Graham Stephan, Andre Jink, and from time to time even dave ramsey (as a guilty pleasure). None of these guys are outright nefarious scammers

like the hustle bros you will see pitching an amazon automation course and this automatically makes them a million times better than this other group. What’s more is that they are genuinely entertaining, they give people a sneak peek into their own success while presenting relatively dry content

in a way that is funny and easy to understand. The problem is though. Personal Finance should be boring. There is a common saying that everything you need to know about personal

href="https://cashnews.co/finance" style="font-weight: bold; color: #1a73e8; text-decoration: none;">Finance should be able to fit on a postcard, some authors have actually done it. But when you are committing to an upload schedule of a 15 minute CashNews.co every single day of every

single week you are going to run out of things on that post card to talk about. Now this is no good, because as these people will show you, they make millions of dollars a year from their daily CashNews.co’s so they are not exactly going to turn around and say “oh well I have taught you

everything you need to know now… so long and thanks for all the fish” Of course not that would be silly… and I am sure any one of us that is in there position would do the same thing that they are, which is riding that damn gravy train for as long as they can. But to do this they need to

create more content than what this posted note can provide so they branch out into a few different broad categories. Personal Stories About Their Success Reactions Predictions And making up new lessons Now to start off with lets look at the least problematic of these formats, reaction

CashNews.co’s. Reaction CashNews.cos are everywhere on youtube, and they they get a bit of a bad rap. But when you think about it this CashNews.co format can range from absolutely terrible all the way to genuinely value adding and informative. The CashNews.co’s that people like Graham or Kevin

make are normally towards the good end. They will normally react to personal Finance by watching CashNews.co series like millennial money or they talk about high end

Real Estate which is obviously an area of extensive expertise for these guys. There are other’s like Dave Ramsey who will do live reactions to people that call into the show and despite these being a bit repetitive they aren’t really doing any harm (apart from the ego’s of

the callers) If you want to argue that these live interviews are not really reaction CashNews.co’s just think to yourself, “am I watching this to see the solution to the persons problem, oooorrrrr am I watching this to smugly partake in Dave’s reaction to this persons situation?” Even still

this is just a bit of light entertainment and who knows, maybe you will pick up a nugget of information along the way. No problems there, apart from when these reactions turn into predictions… Financial predictions are almost impossible to make… even the largest financial firms in the world

filled with teams of PHD Quantitative Analysts struggle to outperform regular market returns consistently, if at all. It’s therefore frustrating to see someone like Meet Kevin, make predictions about the future of a highly volatile stock like Tesla before his audience… and yes I know… he

gives the standard disclaimer “that this is not financial advice”, but when a supposably reputable figure that positions themselves as a personal Finance expert brings up

an official looking spreadsheet and predicts 100% within the next 12 months… well it’s not unrealistic to see how some of his impressionable audience would follow his not advice. Now this is just one of the most blatant examples, but all of these personal

href="https://cashnews.co/finance" style="font-weight: bold; color: #1a73e8; text-decoration: none;">Finance personalities is guilty of giving these “not advice” pieces of advice throughout their content. This can range anywhere from invest into dividend stocks, all the way up to

only buy a duplex and rent out the other side. Both pieces of advice that are not necessarily bad, but are just grossly overgeneralised and make no accommodations for the financial situations of their viewers. Now my friend Richard over at the plain bagel actually made a CashNews.co earlier this

week that explored the issue of picking stocks from the perspective of an actual financial professional who’s job it is to pick stock for clients. I was actually considering not making this CashNews.co at all after seeing that one because I thought Mr Bagel made a pretty fair and well rounded

argument against this all… but then…. I saw this… Alright, this is where the serious issues start. Making up new rules for people to follow. I hate to be the one to break it to you, and I truly do mean this in the nicest possible way. But Graham Stephan is a ex Real Estate

agent and social media influencer, HE DOES NOT KNOW the 5 best Investments to make you rich. For that matter, nobody knows any Investments that will make you rich, and if they did they sure wouldn’t be sharing them on a YouTube CashNews.co. Despite popular

opinions these days, good Investments should not double overnight, they “should instead” continually provide value over many years or decades and return that value back to the investor steadily over the same time period. The generally accepted rate of return for a

well-diversified Portfolio is anywhere between 6% all the way up to 12% if your doing really well. The bad news here is that this is not going to make you rich, just like we said at the beginning of the vide. Well actually it’s not going to make you rich unless you have a decent

Income already and are very disciplined about consistently contributing to this Portfolio over a long enough time period for compound interest to do it’s thing. Even then it will make you old and rich, which is not what the people want… What they want is to

hear about how the people talking to them got so rich. Which is where we get to the last type of concerning content… Personal Stories about their success. Now who doesn’t love a good success story, especially when it’s the tale of a scrappy underdog proving all the naysayers wrong. Which is

something most of these guys have. Graham didn’t get into university, Meet Kevin started from less than a thousand dollars, Dave Ramsey went totally bankrupt and the same is true for the rest of them, none are turning around and saying I studied like crazy through high school, got into a good

university then became a doctor or an investment banker. Why? Well because it’s much more entertaining, and it sounds much more attainable to the average viewer. And whether we like to admit it to ourselves or not, there is an element of; “If I watch these CashNews.co’s I will learn to do

what he did” Now that’s not to say these back stories are all a lie, but more so they are just the product of survivorship bias. For every Dave, Graham and Kevin, there are thousands of people that didn’t have the unique set of skills and the luck to break into the incredibly lucrative roles

they found themselves in. Sure graham didn’t go to university, but he did work his way into an incredibly prestigious Real Estate firm, so what he lacked in book smarts were obviously more than made up for with personal branding and good old fashioned sales ability. If you are a

fantastic salesman then sure go ahead. There is actually a widely accepted array of high paying jobs with varying levels of effort to certainty. Sales sits somewhere towards the riskier side of this array. Something that is very high effort would be becoming a surgeon or a dentist, it takes years

and years in medical school, but once you are practicing you are all but garunteed a high Income and standard of living for the rest of your life. Of course at the other end of the spectrum is something like “becoming a Rockstar, or famous actor, or yeah even a youtuber….” It

doesn’t take too much effort when compared to years in med school, or 100 hour weeks in an investment bank but it’s also incredibly unlikely to pay off. Whether they do it intentionally or not the “personal #1a73e8; text-decoration: none;">Finance personalities” perpetuate the narrative of dropping out of school and building your own destiny, which has worked for them, but will not work for most people. It also sounds eerily familiar to the promises made by the more despicable side of

the financial gurus… Now there is one last problem with these personal back stories, and that is that they are used to justify all of these other pieces of content. To demonstrate this we are once again going to pick on Meet Kevin. One of his most popular CashNews.co’s is the tale of how he

built up his property Portfolio from $0 to 5.5 million dollars by the age of 27. You are welcome to go and watch the CashNews.co but the TLDR is that through a series of flips and Equity releases he built up a highly leveraged position of Real

Estate Assets that were Cash Flow positive. Sounds great, but it is ridiculously risky. Take out 5:1 leveraged position in the Stock Market and most people will think you lost your mind, but take out a 10:1 leveraged position on a house,

and you are an investment genius. Most people don’t realise how risky Real Estate can be. Now of course Kevin was lucky, he started investing at the start of one of the longest Real Estate bull runs in history and in his defence he has deleveraged his position

significantly since, but this is the DEFINITION of survivorship bias. Nobody is making a CashNews.co about how they lost their life Savings trying to flip homes. Had Kevin started his investment journey in 2004, he certainly wouldn’t be telling stories of financial success on

youtube, if anything he would be lucky to be an extra on the Big Short. (play scene of stripper with 5 houses and a condo) Now if I sound overly cinical let me follow this all up by saying given the opportunity to make as much money as these guys are by uploading CashNews.cos to the internet I

would sell out so damn fast… But they are still selling something, it might not be a course, or an AI that can trade forex for you or even a book, but they are selling you into keep on watching. Bleak realities about the tough road to reliably create wealth doesn’t quiet grab attention like an

open mouth and a flashy headline but in a world where attention is the new currency, you should spend yours wisely. Anyway, if you do happen to get rich by following in their footsteps you should follow that all up by commenting how dumb I am on this CashNews.co and then watching our CashNews.co on

what to do next after making millions of dollars. If you did enjoy this CashNews.co please consider liking and subscribing to keep on learning how money works.