The problems with personal finance gurus

Mike Dang of TheBillfold.com interviewed financial journalist Helaine Olen, who recently published an expose on the personal finance industry, including the journalists who cover it, in the book “Pound Foolish: Exposing the Dark Side of the Personal Finance Industry.”

Here is an excerpt:

Another thing about “gurus” like Suze Orman and Dave Ramsey, as you point out, is that they’re trying to convince you that they were just like you once, and look at how they’re doing now! Suze Orman was once a waitress, and as the story goes, she really had to fight her way to success. Dave Ramsey bounced back from bankruptcy. And as you say, Orman and Ramsey did not become wildly successful because they saved better or invested smarter than everybody else—they became wildly successful because they were able to sell themselves and their products to people.

The whole genre of self-help depends on the story. It’s like almost being born again. You know: “I had my moment.” Suze has her moment with a waitress when she realizes the waitress is richer than her, and Dave Ramsey has this moment when he has to tell people that debt is bad. They’ve got the story, and people like that moment. And so we don’t ask the questions. And Suze Orman, to be fair, was a successful financial planner. She obviously had an ongoing business. Dave Ramsey was definitely in bankruptcy when he started. But we want to believe. And one of the things I find fascinating is the conflict of interest in their work. I work in a field where if I accepted coffee from a source, I have editors who could get quite angry at me. But people will say, but Suze and Dave need to make a living. First of all, do they have the right to make a living selling you conflicted advice? And second, Suze Orman’s got $30 million, doesn’t she already have enough of a living? What are you talking about? Dave Ramsey is worth lord alone knows what. It’s a conflict, and a basic conflict, and I don’t think they cop to it. Certainly Ramsey doesn’t. He still goes around telling people that you could still get 12 percent annual returns in the markets, and if you want to know how to do that, Dave has his “Endorsed Local Providers”, and you can go to them. I mean, you’ve got to be kidding. There’s no way to do that, that I’m aware of. There wasn’t a way to do that back in the ’90s during the bull market. You might have a year here, and a year there, but to plan on that is just absurd. And it’s not right. But people are scared, and they want to believe.

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