Blog Focus: I Will Teach You To Be Rich

Last Updated on Monday, 15 February 2010 09:05 Written by Monday, 8 February 2010 05:04

Coverage: personal finance, entrepeneurship, real estate, saving money, taxes

Platform: WordPress?

Reach: Alexa: 27930, feedreaders: 9795

Updates available: RSS, email, twitter

Premium services: workshops, book

Monetization: sales of premium services

With a name like “I Will Teach You To Be Rich,” this blog had better be good.  It is.  Hands down – I Will Teach You To Be Rich is my favorite personal finance blog. 

The reason is simple.  While dozens of personal finance blogs deliver money-saving tips, Ramit Sethi’s blog puts these tips in focus.  He doesn’t encourage you to spend hours to save a small amount of money.  Instead, Sethi begins and ends with the simple premise that your efforts should be centered where their impact is greatest.  He does not preach the religion of frugality; instead, he encourages readers to match their expenditures with their priorities.  Don’t waste a lot of money on something that means little to you.

The post “Conscious Spending” describes this approach well.  In it, Sethi writes:

There are plenty of blogs on frugality. This is not one of them. I think you can have lots of fun ">debating the minutiae about which grain of rice is cheaper, but it doesn’t really get you much further towards your goals. Also, most Americans are not brought up with the idea of frugality. I’ve been in a car with friends who were so hungry that they had to pull over and get food even though we were only 5 minutes from home.

For me, writing a blog on frugality would be like trying to convince an ankylosaurus to dance a god damn jig. As a result, I don’t believe that frugality is very sustainable for a lot of people. Yes, maybe we’ll stop buying those lattes (or whatever), but something else will take its place. In my opinion, unless there’s a fundamental mindset from a young age, it’s hard to change the I-want-it-now habits. Whether you agree with me or not, that’s why I don’t write a blog based on where to find the cheapest laundry detergent.

Finally, and this is the most important, frugality alone doesn’t get you to your goals. It’s a helpful but not sufficient condition. So I take another approach of trying to write about money holistically, while urging you to make your own decisions about what’s important enough to spend a lot on, and what’s not.