.Which Financial Advice Should You Trust?
Which Financial Advice Should You Trust?
By J.D. Roth — published 19 August 2019 (updated 22 August 2019)
Commenting on a recent article, Carmine Red asked an excellent question:
How do you evaluate the financial advice you get from other sources? Specifically, how do you decide if some piece of advice is for you, or if you should discard some adjacent advice. Is there an amount of pick-and-choose?
GRS definitely doesn’t seem like a dogmatic 100% one-way-of-doing things site, so I’d love to hear about the critical thinking you employ, and that I’m sure we can all use a little of since we’re getting bombarded by financial “do this!” or “don’t do this” instructions from so many different dimensions.
Carmine is right: GRS is not dogmatic. From the start, my top admonition has been “do what works for you”. By this I mean that you should test financial advice to see if it works for you and your situation. There's little (if any) advice that applies to 100% of people in 100% of cases. Life is messy. Money is messy.
So, how can you decide whom to trust? How can you evaluate a piece of financial advice to decide whether it has merit? And if the financial advice does have merit, how can you tell if it's right for your life?
Today, let's take a deep dive into this question. Let's explore how to evaluate all of the financial advice you get — from the internet, from television, and in real life.
Which Financial Advice Should You Trust?
How to Evaluate Financial Advice
Before I answer Carmine's question directly, I want to approach it obliquely. If you find this section boring, please skip to the next one. I won't hold it against you!
In 1940, Mortimer J. Adler published How to Read a Book, which contained 400 pages of advice on doing something that most people would argue needs no instruction. In 1967, he revised the book and turned it into a little masterpiece.
In the revised edition, Adler argues that there are four levels of reading:
Elementary Reading. At this basic level, the reader is able to answer the question, “What does the sentence say?” But reading at this stage is a mechanical act.
Inspectional Reading. At this level, a reader's aim is to get the most from a book (or article) in a minimum of time. “Inspectional reading is the art of skimming systematically,” Adler writes. Your aim is to get a surface understanding of the book, to answer the question, “What is this book about?”
Analytical Reading. At this level, you're doing the best, most complete and thorough reading of a book that you can do. Inspectional reading is done quickly. Analytical reading is done without a time limit. Its aim is understanding. This is the sort of reading that most of us do most of the time.
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