Personal Finance Has Become Another Thing to Buy

More than advice, many brands are selling you a lifestyle.

Everything is shopping. Walk down the street, browse social media, tune into your favorite TV show — everyone, everywhere wants you to buy stuff. Shop our sale. Buy this fancy pillow for your cat. Support small businesses, sponsored by American Express. Ironically, even efforts to get you to stop shopping have also become shopping.

Personal finance exists at a tricky intersection between financial services and self-improvement. And it’s a lucrative consumer product. There’s a lot of money in teaching people how to be better at money. The problem is — perhaps because of that tricky intersection — the industry often reinforces many of the problems it claims are within your control.

Before we go any further, I need to admit that I’ve been part of this problem. I started writing about money around 2014. A few years prior, in the middle of a recession, I moved to Los Angeles to be a writer. Like many creatives who move to this city, I was financially struggling. Blogging was a way to process my money anxiety, share what I learned about financial management, and connect with others in the same boat. Four years later, I published a personal finance book that’s still on sale in bookstores and online. As such, the views expressed here may be somewhat hypocritical, but that doesn’t make them any less valid. It’s precisely my own experience within the industry that left me feeling uneasy about being a part of it.

It’s disingenuous to teach people how to navigate the perils of consumerism while simultaneously encouraging them to consume.

Like any other industry, personal finance uses marketing to build an audience of people who want to consume their product. But this ventures into problematic territory when the “product” being sold is financial literacy. It’s disingenuous to teach people how to navigate the perils of consumerism while simultaneously reinforcing their role as a consumer. And, in some cases, outrightly encouraging them to shop.

To be fair, there’s a fuzzy line between consumer affairs and personal finance. Both matters deal with money. Both encourage consumers to spend strategically. Consumerism inherently exists within personal finance — you can imagine how an article on the best budget travel destinations or how to decorate your home for under $500 could toe that tricky line. But oftentimes, more than literacy, personal finance brands offer the allure of a certain lifestyle, whether it’s working for yourself, travel to faraway places, or a perfectly decorated home. Marketing and consumerism might be a necessary part of personal finance, but it becomes a problem when financial literacy is merely used as a guise to encourage shopping.

We’re not only ignoring the structural barriers people face, we’re also underscoring them.

Along with literacy, many brands turn activism into a product, too. Social issues are tricky to address within the space because so many of these issues are caused by the very system personal finance teaches you to navigate. Wage growth is slow, wealth inequality is still rising, and COVID has made things worse. In an article for the New York Times, Kate Bahn, director of labor market policy and an economist at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, told me about her misgivings with the personal finance industry. By reinforcing personal responsibility via budgeting tips, for example, we’re not only ignoring the structural barriers people face, we’re also underscoring them. “Maybe that’s why I’m so frustrated,” Bahn said.

You can find an example of Bahn’s complaint in the “women and money” rhetoric. All too often, the response to the gender and racial wealth gap is for women to negotiate more, stop apologizing, know your worth, advocate for yourself, and so on. This advice makes for snappy sound bites and catchy content — it’s easier to sell. But it also exudes toxic feminism, a type of feminism more concerned with power than equality. The more complicated truth is that women — and more so Black women and men — pay a social penalty when they negotiate. In one series of studies, Black workers received lower starting salaries when they negotiated. In some cases, potential employers may rescind job offers entirely.

If personal finance were the answer to fighting inequality, it would have worked by now. And it would have worked for everyone.

When you turn personal finance into a business, that business’ brand has to be catchy and snappy, and many of the nuances of social issues get lost or erased. But even worse, many experts rebrand personal finance as activism. Get rich! Ask for more! Invest in Louis Vuitton! (Actual advice I heard at a “women and money” event.)

Sure, financial literacy is useful for navigating a capitalist system. I can even see the logic behind using money as a way to empower yourself to fight against a system designed for you to fail. But positioning personal finance as the solution to fighting inequality feels like a progressive rebrand of the bootstrap narrative. If personal finance were the answer, it would have worked by now. And it would have worked for everyone.

None of this is a new problem. In the book Pound Foolish, journalist Helaine Olen details the many issues with financial services and self-proclaimed money experts. “If the financial services industry is forced to take the time to find out what their customers’ best interests are and then act on them,” Olen writes, “the industry doesn’t have a viable business model.”

Sure, personal finance can still teach us the basics of how to manage money. It’s not literacy itself that’s the problem — it’s the commodification of that literacy. Along with the rise in social media marketing, it seems another version of this problem has emerged: The exploitation of consumers by selling them shopping disguised as financial education.