Why So Much Financial Advice is Wrong
Why So Much Financial Advice is Wrong
By A Lawyer and Her Money November 10, 2020
The internet is a strange and fascinating place. There is a wealth of information, but not all of it good. Lots of people write content just to sell you stuff. And others are just idiots.
Even good-hearted people trying to impart knowledge can only speak from their own experience. The decisions they made were “good decisions” because they worked out. That, however, doesn’t mean you can or should make the same decisions now that they made in the past.
As much as personal finance bloggers like to say that the path to riches is simple and straightforward, personal finance is personal. Most financial advice is wrong because it fails to take into account how different each person’s situation is and how fast the world is changing. No one’s experience is universal, and the lessons that worked for one person may work for others, but they also might not.
The Role of Timing in My Financial Success
My high income is directly tied to attending law school. So I could write an article about how everyone can go to law school to get a high-paying job, right? No, because I know enough about the journey to know that my path was not guaranteed even when I did it, and that what I did back then might not make sense now.
My graduation timing was fortuitous. If I had graduated in 2010 or 2011, I would have graduated into an unexpected recession in the legal field. At that time, many graduates were unable to find any legal employment, let alone high-paying jobs. Research shows that graduates from those years are still lagging behind financially compared to graduates before and after the recession. But graduating earlier wouldn’t have solved that problem. Many who graduated in 2008 or 2009 were laid off early into their careers and may have struggled to find another job after that.
Instead, I graduated in 2012, which showed vast improvements in job prospects over the 2010-2011 graduates. Furthermore, because we stared in 2009, we all already knew that the job market was difficult and were going in eyes wide open, which surely made a difference in our strategies for finding employment.
The Role of Dumb Luck in My Financial Success