What makes a good personal finance podcast

Personal finance news operation The Motley Fool, celebrating the 10th anniversary of its first podcast, plans to launch an international-focused podcast later this spring.

It will be Motley Fool’s second international podcast, after one in Australia, said Chris Hill, who hosts “Market Fool Money” and “MarketFoolery” and oversees The Motley Fool’s audio programming, including podcasts, radio, and smart speaker news updates.

“This is going to be a new show that is going to be an international show,” said Hill in an interview. “That’s all I can tell you at this point.”

Motley Fool has expanded internationally into countries such as Singapore, Canada, Germany, Great Britain and Australia.

“Motley Fool Money” had its first episode on Feb. 22, 2009. It began as a weekly-15-minute podcast about business and investing and made history the following January when it became the first podcast to make the leap to nationally-syndicated broadcast radio.

The show currently airs on 55 stations across America and is consistently one of the highest-ranked business shows on Apple Podcasts.

The show paved the way for other popular podcasts from The Motley Fool, including weekly shows “Rule Breaker Investing” and “Motley Fool Answers” and daily shows “Industry Focus” and “MarketFoolery.”

“When we started it, it was partly because we listened to other business and investing podcasts that were around in 2009, and we didn’t hear anyone talking about stocks and investing the way we do at the offices here at The Motley Fool,” said Hill. “So that was part of why we started it, to give potential listeners something that we would want to listen to ourselves.”

He said the show, and Motley Fool’s other podcasts, have been successful because they stick to a simple strategy

“The Motley Fool was founded on a few basic principles,” said Hill. “One of them was that stock investing was not brain surgery, that people with an interest can do it and do it well. And if you present information with how businesses work and make money and plan to make more money in the future in a straightforward way without jargon, people will respond to that.”

Hill added that the podcasts that have followed have continued to focus on content.

“Like any business, we want to pay attention to our resources and our costs and how much time this takes,” he said. There are a lot of podcasts out there, and some of them are highly produced. And some of them are shows that people put weeks and months into a single episode.

“For us, we wanted to figure out ways to provide really good, relevant content from basic personal finance information like we do on ‘Motley Fool Answers’ to stock investing, which is what we do on the other four shows. We want to be able to figure out ways to sustainably produce relevant content. If it was good content, people would stick around.”