Mansplaining About Money — Please Stop

F**k you, I won’t do what you tell me

If a bunch of money nerds rage against any machine, it ought to be mainstream personal finance, led by the retirement industry and condescending, set-in-their-ways money writers and managers who run light on effective solutions.

The more you talk down to people and treat them like fools, the more they’re not going to do what you tell them. Our response to conventional money advice and investment guidance represents resistance, even if not the conscious, take to the streets kind.

If you’re on the lower end of Generation X, a millennial, or Generation Z, you rage against the machine of bad ideas. You have no loyalty to shit that doesn’t work. That’s baby boomer and silent generation stuff. Sticking it out amid futile efforts.

Instead of trying to squeeze water from a rock, we adapt, share knowledge and experiences, and strive to empower one another.

This is where it’s at.

In this article, I briefly explain what I mean and detail the shift personal finance needs to make now.

Nobody should be telling anybody else what to do anyway.

The personal financial equivalent of mansplaining. It can’t get much more inane, useless, and unhelpful.

I don’t even need to link to an article example. If you only frequent money-related content as often as you visit the dentist or do cocaine (choose your own adventure), you’ve seen the story before:

Alarming headline: Only 5% of Americans Have Enough Money Saved for Retirement

The hook: We’re in a retirement crisis!

The problem: You’re not saving enough!!

The solution: Start doing what we’ve been telling you to do for the last thirty years, you complete, undisciplined, and lazy fool (especially if you’re Gen X and especially twice if you’re a millennial).

The go-to solution the retirement industry and blind money writers float isn’t working. The standard save $500 a month for 30 or 40 years and retire with a $1,000,000 or more. But definitely more, because their models show a million isn’t going to be enough. Shortly thereafter, you’ll probably die on the golf course.

They’re all about bad news.

They’re all about what they learned in school.

They’re all about talking down to you from a financial district skyscraper or affluent suburban office park.

This model isn’t working, evidenced by these incessant stories. The ones that regurgitate the same statistics about how young people aren’t saving enough and large swaths of old people didn’t save enough, forcing them to work into retirement or live less than comfortable existences in old age.

At this juncture, the experts, gurus, and retirement advisors double down on the $500 a month for 40 years formula. They literally offer no other advice, outside of the occasional get a second job or side hustle or move to a less expensive city. If somebody else suggests I move to Asheville, North Carolina or some random city in Arizona, I’m gonna scream.

Not their ideas to start with, but they thoughtlessly co-opt them because they got nothing, other than what they have been professionally conditioned to believe, irrespective of if it works or not.

Err, let me put this another way.

What they believe can work and sometimes does. Except when it doesn’t work — quite often. This is where we hit a wall and they get all defensive on us.

Classic mansplaining. I know better than you because of who I am and I’m going to be a condescending prick about it. You don’t have what it takes to execute our advice. You don’t have the work ethic or will to pull it off.

All you need to do is stop buying lattes and put your money in an index fund. But you also need to clear your credit card debt, build an emergency fund, buy a house, and make sure you have good health insurance by the time you reach old age.

Can’t do all of this? Too bad. We got nothing else for you, except endless articles and guest spots on the Today Show where we define the problem and offer the same cold and tired solutions.

Great money writers flip the script. They have the intellectual capacity to assess the situation from a more realistic and appropriate perspective. They speak from experience, not the benefit of old money.

Take Marc Guberti, for example, in a recent Making of a Millionaire article:

But what if you didn’t need a $1 million portfolio and could retire sooner? Most people have the wrong view on retirement.

We shouldn’t just stop working because we’d lose our sense of purpose…

Rather than fully cut off work, I believe in a semi-retirement approach where you work from home and leverage multiple income streams.

I made the conscious decision to go all-in freelance writing because, like Marc, I believe in the notion of “semi-retirement.” I call it temporary retirement, which basically means “retiring” in fits and starts. In other words, taking periods of time to work less or not work at all. I made this decision because I want to be able to be lazy, travel a fair bit, and work at the same time.

I can only accomplish this by freelancing from home (“home” can be anywhere) and ensuring I have ample and enduring cash flow.

Let’s be clear — my take (and if I can speak for Guberti) isn’t as basic as “get a side hustle.”

It’s multi-layered and more thoughtful. It’s not about making extra money so you can hit this absurdly unrealistic number of a million dollars plus. It’s about (re)assessing your lifestyle and how you can situate it alongside your plans and desires to not only make it work, but to thrive outside of traditional conceptions of retirement.

Simply put, you’re not setting yourself up to fail. You’re creating the conditions for success.

Guberti sums it the heck up:

Financial freedom doesn’t mean never working another day in your life. We should continue working and earning income, but we can use cashflow to prop up our income as we look for income streams that provide financial freedom AND additional income.

Viewing your retirement path from this lens makes the numbers easier to attain and will still provide income and a sense of purpose on the other side. (my emphasis)

This is the opposite of personal financial mansplaining.

This is writing on money that empowers rather than intimidates.

It doesn’t end in an anxiety-producing conundrum. It generates ideas, strategies, and the larger notion of viewing the world — and your money — from a more thoughtful and productive perspective.

This article is for informational and entertainment purposes only. It should not be considered Financial or Legal Advice. Not all information will be accurate. Consult a financial professional before making any major financial decisions.