Let me teach you how to be financially independent and not need anything. In order to do so I am going to need $49.95 preferably in small bills up front. This in a nutshell is the inherent conflict of profiting off of those seeking financial independence. I have enough money that I don’t need yours so why do I need to make more from the very people that I am supposed to be helping to get financial independence? Even if payment is indirect the conflict still applies. If I desire more money but am telling you that once you reach financial independence you do not need additional money to be happy then am I just lying? How many offering courses, e-books, and coaching seem to live this conflict obliviously?
What Kind of Financial Champ Gives Up Free Money
The conflict above is part of the reason that I have kept this little site ad free and am chosing to make zero money off of it so far. However, at the same time I also consider myself a capitalist and did not get to financial independence by accident. What kind of a financial champ would I be if I gave up free money?
The reality today is that this site would make so little money currently that it would not be worth my consideration to pursue that cash. I could create a half time job for myself growing the site and building partnerships. However, after a life amassing money and skills that both compound powerfully, there are other more efficient ways that I could make money if that were the goal. Not to let myself off the hook, this answer is an easy dodge. It is easy to claim the high road over much larger voices out there that monetize when I have so little at stake. Let’s make the question harder.
Mr Maze Faces His Own Conflicts of Interest
What if I went viral and turned into PewDiePie? Would I just keep this site Craigslist or would I go Amazon? I imagine that I would try to keep my voice and the integrity of my ideas paramount. That is the whole point of why I started it. However, I would also likely do some form of monetizing in a way that I felt was fair and transparent to readers.
For better or worse, even though money reduces in value the more one has, it is still security and power even after one’s needs are met. It remains an IOU of something in the future supposedly for value that was created for others in the past. I could use it for charity, for access, for leverage, for status, for future business endeavors, etc. Because there is an inherent conflict of interest, it is important to know who you can trust on your financial journey.
What Are The Motives Of Your Financial Mentor?
As I covered in part one of this article about Why The Internet Won’t Make You Rich or Happy, there are certainly motives for bloggers to say things that they know are dubious or even downright false. It gets clicks when it is controversial or polarizing. However, it is also knowingly being detrimental those that read it. I would offer that this is the worst kind of betrayal to a reader. I advise ignoring these voices. As much as I would like to call out some of the provocateurs that knowingly do this, it would only mean playing into their hands. It is up to you to spot it and block those voices on your own. The internet is a crazy place. However, detrimental motives aren’t always so intentional.
Unintentional Motives Of Your Financial Mentor
I once met a blogger who has 4 different money and lifestyle sites. He told me that he only focuses on the 2 with the highest conversion rates. He went on to explain that he also chooses what to write solely by which keyword searches are the most lucrative. If everyone is searching NFTs or lessons learned from 30 years as a venture capitalist, he writes that article even if he previously knew nothing about the topic. When I meet people like this, it becomes obvious that his primary goal is to make money as opposed to that he has particular knowledge about money or wellness that he is just dying to share. However, to him this is just what it means to blog. He assumes that his “content” is “value add” so what is the problem? Most of us don’t question our own motives very hard. Like a fish who never asks what water is.
Just because someone heavily monetizes her blog or podcast does not necessarily mean it is bad content. However, it does create bias.
Is Your Financial Champ Biased?
If your financial champ is recommending credit cards and the same products or services that offer the most lucrative affiliate program it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that there might be a bias there. Money related motivations are a common bias.
However, we are also biased by our own life experiences. I was listening to a podcast panel and one speaker claimed that, “most people that are not wealthy are not creative…If we are creative people, I think that there is plenty out there.” Another panelist patiently offered that if global wealth was divided equally, each person would only have around $13K…so…even with an abundance mindset there seems a point at which this logic breaks down? It would be easy to cancel the first panelist for shaming those without wealth. However, he himself was once poor. He then started getting into motivational speakers and used confidence and a feeling of creativity to make millions as a real estate broker. To him this statement was proven true by his own experience.
In the same podcast, another panelist offered that, “money, once you figure out how to earn it actually becomes pretty easy to make.” What?! Most of us probably don’t feel like money is pretty easy to make. However, that same panelist was once living in his parents basement after graduation. He then learned an online marketing skill at the perfect time when it was just starting to emerge as something that every business needed. He rode this trend applying this skill as a consultant for businesses and made over a million dollars in one year! If you came from that unique experience, might you think that money is easy to make once you figure out how?
These types of bias from both panelists are unintentional and inevitable. The life experiences of these speakers are outliers. In some sense, anyone that you hear from is an outlier or you wouldn’t be hearing from us. Non-outliers usually don’t have audiences right? Factoring in this bias is important as you assess how similar your path may be to this person’s and choose what to apply to your own financial journey.
Does This Mean That I Should Only Listen To People Who Are Like Me?
In a word, no. America today has just gone crazy in it’s secular polarization. Diverse perspectives are how growth happens. The only thing that matters if you are trying to increase wealth or happiness is that you listen to someone who is good at what you want to be good at and that it can translate to you and your situation. If you want support make a friend who is like you. However if you want growth, find someone that is who you want to be in a particular area even if they are very different than you. Sometimes that very difference is part of the benefit. The most important thing is that your mentor is actually a champ and that usually means he or she has done it as opposed to just talking about it or researching it.
Do They Talk About It Or Have They Done It?
An extremely well known financial independence blogger and I were once talking to someone looking to build her savings and he joked that if she wanted to make money she should start offering paid courses on how to be financially independent and then it would all become a self fulfilling prophecy. His sarcastic truth was that too many of those aspiring to be financially independent seem to be telling others how to do it and then using the income that they make doing that as proof of their own expertise on the subject.
There are plenty of passionate people looking to offer advice online who have never actually done it before. While there are scammers out there, my own feeling is that many people simply do not realize that they may be offering detrimental advice for their own benefit. Perhaps it is someone who is great at public speaking and really would like to start a business so he starts a business telling others how to start a business. Perhaps someone who is struggling with mental health issues becomes a wellness writer because he considers himself an expert after struggling with it so much. On his good days he blogs advice and on his bad days he gets a boost from his 1,000s of twitter followers. Like the FI writer who would really like to be FI some day, can any of these people actually be considered an authority?
I will admit that I did this myself when I just started writing online. I volunteered to do an interview on retirement advice. However, at the time I had barely any retirement experience under my belt. I thought I was offering well researched advice, but what I was really doing even though I didn’t see it was trying to get noticed within this community. To his credit, the guy that I was proposing the piece to, gently recommended that I get some time under my belt and he would be happy to do the article after a couple years. Of course that makes more sense. How did I not question my own motives?
What Are My Motives Today?
Today, my motives are different. I also find myself with an embarrassment of luck and good fortune. The skills and habits that I built to become financially independent continue to operate almost on autopilot and compound. However, my lady who has continued to work for reasons beyond money has also experienced rocket ship growth with her company. Despite Covid economic shutdowns, the stock market too has risen to all time highs as I write this and thanks to low borrowing interest rates my rental property values have gone up immensely. All of this means that my financial situation has strengthened substantially.
My risk for bias because of these life experiences only increases as a result. It also has me asking whether it is still appropriate for me to worry about money to the degree that I have in the past. After all, part of why I wanted to get to financial independence was so that I would not have to worry about money anymore. So why keep writing about it? Paradoxically, those aspiring to live a life outside of the maze are likely very concerned with exactly that financial aspect. However, I should appropriately think about this less. What are my own motives? Status? Self Expression?
I will even take it a step further and offer that if I had it all figured out and was complete, then why would I be writing on the internet at all? Why would I need it if my life is complete without it? This question is honestly one that I have been asking myself recently and it is one of the reasons that I am not writing as much these days. I don’t want to need it in my life. That does not feel healthy to me. Only writing when I am moved to do so is part of the joy of optional work.
While I stand behind this site that I have created online, I would offer that your best financial mentor may not be online at all.
Why Your Best Financial Mentor May Not Be Online
There is an inherent conflict of interest when someone is making money by telling you how to make money. It also raises the question of whether the supposed mentor is really an authority. Investing and entrepreneurial geniuses are typically not offering courses for fifty bucks. Instead they are busy making millions investing and starting businesses. Those busy doing it are the ones I would prefer to get advice from. This is why I would offer that your best mentor needs to be sought out.
The good news is that the best operators are busy operating rather than talking about it. They don’t have an audience and since most other people don’t even like to talk about money, these champs may rarely get hit up for advice at all. In addition, a personal relationship with someone you seek out reduces the risk of scams, bias, and hidden motives. At its best, a good mentorship leads to a personal relationship with someone that knows you, cares about you, and can also help keep you accountable on your journey.
Who To Trust on The Journey
In part one of this article, I covered some of the pitfalls of the internet. I showed how it is kind of designed to keep you consuming and how it even pulls well intentioned creators into a gray area. While the internet may be fine for getting ideas, it can also become a crutch or a distraction when over consumed.
In part two of this article, we looked at the inherent conflict of interest of financial independence content creators. Motives and bias matter a lot and they are often unintentional. I even explained and questioned some of my own. With much of this in mind, it is important to take control and use one’s own editorial lens on the journey. In addition, your best mentor may not be online at all but rather someone you know. I hope this 2 part series is food for thought on the benefits and pitfalls of what you consume and who to listen to on your own path. best of luck 🙂
How do you deal with these challenges on your journey? Or perhaps you are a content creator yourself? Feel free to chime in on the comments below.
3 comments
i am a content creator, but a small fry. i know you’ve visited https://freddysmidlap.com in the past so you have an idea what it is all about. i put up some ads about 8 months ago just to see if i could make any money and how much. it took me 5 months to make the $100 minimum to get paid by google adsense! it’s not that i need the money and should probably take most of them down for readability.
i worry about what info younger readers consume sometimes, especially when it relates to relying on advice from a person who has never accomplished anything. i think people like to read their peer group, though, especially with regard to age.
as an arbiter i would ask you this: do you find my musings transparent when it comes to investing? what i strive for is something along the lines of 1. this is what we are trying to accomplish 2. this is the basic strategy 3. this is where i got many of my ideas 4. these are the results in real time.
it’s still a fun hobby for now and gratifying when people have said they found something useful or at least given a different perspective.
Yikes $100 over 5 months is even less than I thought, but I guess you don’t know until you try so thanks for sharing those results. Hobby and gratifying when others see value in what you write are what drive me currently as well. No one has ever called me an arbiter before. The closest is maybe saying that something I did kind of bites. Hence I can’t claim any authority but as you’ve mentioned before you try to be transparent and be clear on data versus opinions and tend to share “what has worked for me” rather than “you should do this”
I’ve noticed that content quality almost always has an inverse relationship to the level of marketing of that content. If you are selling courses explaining how to make money by selling courses about how to make money, are you really adding anything of value? Of course not. The best advice is the fundamental principle everyone at least at some level knows. Spend less than you earn and invest the difference. But even this advice is difficult for certain groups who may not have access to banks, are frequently the target of predatory lending, and have generally been excluded from financial markets. You really cant understand what that lifestyle is like until you lived it or at least lived near it and seen it’s effects.
But of course everyone has different perspectives, lived experiences, and countless events over their lives that influence their decisions. So for someone who through a combination of luck, skill, and privilege made it to financial independence, it would be easy for them to tell everyone else to recreate what they did.
Unfortunately we have a tendency to overestimate the degree our skill, and underestimate the degree of luck and privilege that helped us on our way. Yes hard work, problem solving, and critical thinking got me to my current role but so did luck, timing, and the benevolence of others. So telling someone to do exactly what I did would be unhelpful at best or patronizing and tone deaf at worst.