Book Review: I Will Teach You To Be Rich - Ramit Sethi
It's quite good. I wanted to hate it, but actually I highly recommend it
Ramit Sethi’s book I Will Teach You To Be Rich is one of the most successful personal finance books of the last 2 decades. It was first published in 2009, and reissued in 2019. High quality personal finance books stand the test of time, as good personal finance ideas are not particularly decade specific. The fact that this one is approaching 20 years old makes it more worthy of a current book review, rather than less.
Here are the biggest strengths of Sethi’s book.
Voice. Sethi brings a brash “I am not your CPA or boring finance professor” style to the book and it mostly works. He’s informal, a little bit cocky, and specific in his friendly “let me simplify this for you” approach. His voice is 3/4 excellent (and 1/4 kind of annoying, if I’m being completely honest.)1
Simplicity - He avoids the technical and jumps to the practical. Do these small steps today, at any $$ level you can manage, and stick to the plan. That is the right approach for nearly everyone, but particularly young people, and he’s relentless with this message throughout the book.
Specificity about what matters. I have previously reviewed everything-burger finance books and this is not that. He specifically rejects the idea that we have to be experts in all things tax and investing and math to do well. We can succeed wildly as non-experts as long as we do the simple things correctly. This is also the right message.
He has a very good six steps on your financial ladder toward investing. Open the 401K to get the employer match, then pay down credit cards, then open your Roth IRA, then max your 401K, then fund your HSA, then fund a taxable brokerage. The order is correct and the details he gives about each one is useful.
Budgeting is a tiresome piece of advice from financial gurus which doesn’t work for most people. Totally agree! We need something better.
Automation is the one great life-hack for savings and investments. Saving properly, and investing properly, is done in a totally passive way. Good investing could be the work of a couple of hours per year, no more, and it requires neither extensive knowledge nor extensive work. Just automation.
Investing can be made incredibly simple. Sethi is a bigger proponent of Retirement Date mutual funds than me. Still, he’s very focused on low-cost index funds and not trying to beat the market through stock picking or-actively managed mutual funds.
Here are a few gems from the book which illustrate his “focus on the big picture & don’t sweat the small stuff” approach.
Rate Chasers
Sethi correctly highlights a common focus on the wrong things, like switching a large savings amount to a different bank because they offer an extra 1% per year. On a significant emergency fund balance like $40,000, this kind of behavior will net you… $400. In a year!
Like, why are you focusing your financial efforts on making $33/month? Surely if you have the wherewithal to accumulate $40K in savings, you should be able to make more money than that. And yet, I do get this question/comment all the time from financial clients: Where should I look to get the best savings rate on my cash?
The correct answer, for $33/month: who cares?
Prenuptials
He makes a surprisingly robust pitch for signing a prenup, and tells the story of doing this in his own life before marrying his wife Cass. Although most people do not need a prenup, some couples with large income or wealth disparities, or a closely held business interest, should sign one. He gets personal about their conversations, and the counseling they did, in advance of signing one.
This is the kind of thing that rubs against the already-strong money taboo of our culture, but he’s doing a service trying to normalize it for the situations where it matters.
Cryptocurrencies are garbage
Sethi’s second edition came out in 2019, which is like 5 generations ago in cryptoworld. We’ve since been through boom-and-busts in ICOs (Initial coin offerings) and NFTs (non-fungible tokens, remember them?) and of course the crypto winter set off by the FTX bankruptcy and Sam Bankman-Fried’s exposure as the wunderkind fraudster of 2021. And then we’ve seen an even bigger price recovery for Bitcoin (well above $100K!), the mainstreaming of Crypto EFTs and attempts by the current administration to create a national crypto reserve (!).
The good news, from my perspective, is that Sethi was totally clear in 2019 about the utter uselessness of crypto at the time, a view that holds up to today. The use case has simply not improved despite the passage of time and nearly 5 generations of crypto developments.
Do I have any problems with Sethi’s book?
Sure. I don’t like the gimmicky “6-week program” promised in the subtitle, and the implication throughout the book that this is (and that there is) a short path to financial success. Real life doesn’t tend to turn around in 6 weeks, if you were previously on the wrong financial path.
On the optimistic side, for someone who hasn’t yet gotten started, has a reasonable base of financial habits and a willingness to follow instructions, solid small steps toward success outlined in this book could be implemented in 6 weeks.
But if you’re already in a hole, 6 weeks isn’t enough time.
What else do I not like?
Sethi maintains and leans in to his brash voice, honed by blog writing. This mostly works, but sometimes leads to him using racial stereotypes like “Haggle like an Indian immigrant.” He has another recurring trope called “What Would An Indian Do?” by which I guess he means ask for a fee waiver, or price discount, or otherwise engage in money-saving behaviors. In the racial politics of 2026, I guess he personally can still get away with this, as the child of Indian immigrants. But it’s probably not a great plan to offer financial advice alongside racial and ethnic stereotypes even if it’s the “acceptable” kind of racism - telling on one’s own ethnic group. I don’t love that part.
Finally, he’s quite aggressive (and overly so) in criticizing investment advisors who charge the typical assets-under-management 1% fee, stating that “hardly anyone” benefits from this, and that the 1% is too large.
While he is correct that a young person starting out with a typical $10-25K investment cannot benefit from an investment advisor, what he doesn’t point out is that no investment advisor actually wants to work with someone with just $25K. That demographic seems to be the target for his blog and book, so his criticism is kind of missing the mark.
In contrast to Sethi, I think the majority of people actually do need an investment advisor. It is not true that “hardly anyone” needs a 1% advisor. If that advisor can set up a simple plan, and then prevent their client from doing themselves financial injury by trading too much, or buying individual stocks, or selling high and buying low, then they will earn every bit of that 1% annual fee.
Don’t get me wrong. My favorite thing in the world - and a key part of my consulting business - is to help people who want to do it themselves and forgo the advisor. I think many people (although not the majority) can forgo an investment advisor if they have enough (self) knowledge, confidence, and financial agency. But that is not universal good advice. Sethi is way too strong in advising people against getting a 1% annual fee assets-under-management financial advisor. Once you get to few hundred thousand in investments, most people need someone, and it’s ok to pay the fees.
Despite those criticisms, this is one of most comprehensive as well as readable personal finance books available. I will add it to my short list of highly recommended books2, alongside classics like Nick Murray’s Simple Wealth Inevitable Wealth, and Andrew Tobias’ The Only Investment Guide You’ll Ever Need.
What’s your top recommendation for a personal finance book?
One obvious annoying factor here is that as the author of my own personal finance book that purports to have a “voice” that isn’t CPA-level boring, Sethi’s book is my competition. So when he is more brash than I am willing to be, and he’s successful with that tone, I am annoyed. On the other hand, his book and video empire is extremely well known in the personal finance space so he would not consider my book competition, haha.
I am linking here to my old Bankers Anonymous blog, where I have reviewed those books in the past.
I couldn’t find this book on my free library app (that’s how I roll with most reading recs), but I got his Money for Couples and I’m enjoying his pointers! He’s not brash or snarky in this one, though—bummer;) More like pump you up Money Coach. I want the snark and quasi-racism!