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I Will Teach You To Be Rich: No Guilt. No Excuses. No BS. Just a 6-Week Program That Works
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Background
Economic Context: The 2008 Financial Crisis
When the first edition of I Will Teach You to Be Rich was published in 2009, the US was reeling from the 2008 Global Financial Crisis and the subsequent Great Recession. From 2007 to 2008, the stock market experienced its most severe crash since the beginning of the Great Depression in 1929, caused by the collapse of the US housing market and, consequently, mortgage-backed bank securities. Leading up to this crash, banks had been selling mortgage loans to people who did not have qualifying credit scores because they could charge these people exorbitant interest rates. Enough of these loans were made that when these people defaulted on their loans, the mortgages and investments attached to them lost their value. As a result, banks that were the pillars of the American economy lost huge amounts of money. Lehman Brothers, for example, had to declare bankruptcy. The collapse of American banks led to a worldwide banking crisis. The US government offered bailouts to banks to keep the economy afloat, but individuals suffered huge financial strains. People lost their homes and jobs and saw their retirement accounts evaporate.
Sethi’s book reflects this historical and economic context in his skepticism regarding conventional financial institutions like big banks and wealth managers. Sethi reflects the widespread lack of faith that people had in these institutions after it became clear that banks had engaged in predatory lending practices, targeting low-income individuals whom they could charge exorbitant interest rates. “Big Banks,” Sethi writes, “are trying to screw you for all the money they can get out of you” (72), and “fund managers across the board still fail to beat the market 75 percent of the time” (191). Instead, Sethi encourages readers regarding Fighting Big Financial Institutions. Most importantly, he wants readers to manage their own accounts through the system that he teaches them.
Genre Context: The Financial Self-Help Industry
The 2008 Global Financial Crisis coincided with the burgeoning of the financial self-help industry and the broadening reach of the internet. The umbrella of the “personal finance industry” covers the services and products related to topics like financial goals, saving, investing, and debt management of private individuals rather than companies or governments. It is the financial equivalent of weight-loss advice, a point Sethi makes in his Introduction.
The first prominent personal finance writers and pundits appeared in the 1990s, before the internet changed the nature of the media. Between the 1990s and 2009, the personal finance industry exploded, aided by the maturation of the internet, which enabled writers to communicate with niche audiences by blogging on sites like WordPress and Tumblr. The industry continued to grow between 2009 and 2019. While YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter were in their infancy in 2009, by 2019 they had become dominant channels of communication between public figures and their audiences. Along with TV shows, newspapers, magazines, and most recently TikTok, media figures everywhere offer advice about lifestyles and reaching personal financial goals.
In 2004, Sethi began his own personal finance blog, “I Will Teach You to Be Rich,” which gave advice on money management, career growth, and life satisfaction. In 2009, he published the first edition of the book based on his blog as the Great Recession was taking hold and the internet was becoming a dominant form of media. Ten years later, in 2019, he published the second edition, specifically addressing an audience in their twenties to early forties whose financial lives, like that of Sethi himself, had been shaped by the effects of the Great Recession.
Sethi’s book bears the influence of this context in several ways. First, personal finance was a crowded field by the time Sethi published his book in 2009. In each chapter, he spends time debunking the advice given by personal finance writers whom he mistrusts, and whom he calls “pundits.” Throughout the book, he distinguishes himself from other personal finance writers by emphasizing the practical, actionable, “not sexy” nature of his advice.
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