Skip to content
organizational purpose

Contrast Between Authors’ and Economists’ Personal Finance Advice

Personal finance is the financial management performed by a person or a family unit to budget, save, and spend monetary resources over time while accounting for various financial risks and future life events. Having the right personal finance strategy is imperative such that the usage or saving of the required family resources could be planned out efficiently. However, according to this Yale Insights post, most of the advice from personal finance experts deviates from traditional economic theory. Let us take a look at what Yale SOM’s James Choi has to offer on the subject.

The article begins by stating that Choi chose the 50 most popular personal finance books on Goodreads and cataloged their recommendations on topics such as mortgages, savings strategy, debt management, and investment allocation in a new report. What he discovered was that, in some circumstances, the advice given to the best sellers was simply inaccurate. However, most of it deviated from economic theory in ways that Choi found more difficult to categorize as clearly beneficial or harmful. He discovered that most financial counselors were preoccupied with how psychological elements such as willpower and motivation influence financial decisions. According to economic theory, your savings rate should be modest in your 20s and extremely high in your 40s to compensate for not saving much in your 20s. As a result, Choi believes that not saving much in your post-college years is best. However, he discovers that the method is not recommended by personal finance books. This is because the writers consider saving to be a discipline, and the sooner you start, the better. According to what he discovers after contemplating reading the best books on personal finance, psychological elements loom as large in confronting debt for prominent writers. Choi also discovered a significant gap in mortgage knowledge between economists and popular authors; 11 novels categorized adjustable-rate mortgages as riskier than fixed-rate mortgages. He, however, does not believe that this technique is always accurate. According to economic models, most consumers should prefer a floating-rate mortgage unless they are severely pushing their budget to buy the property or interest rates are really low right now; this is absolutely contrary to what most writers recommend. In the end, Choi believes it is critical to assess if the advice offered by popular finance books is good or poor. He believes that universities may fill the need by offering personal finance courses.

It is critical that people who are just starting to understand personal finance receive reliable information that will help them spend and save properly. The following are a few important thoughts from Yale SOM’s James Choi on the issue.

Back To Top