amit Sethi, a bestselling personal finance guru turned TV star, has a question for you. What does your rich life look like? Perhaps it’s lounging in the Caribbean with a bottomless piña colada. Or front row seats for Taylor Swift’s. Or maybe, like Sethi himself, it’s as simple as ordering any starter/appetiser on a menu without checking the price.
I only wish I’d met Sethi at college, where he first discovered his innate gift for dispensing advice. It would have made me more mindful of using credit cards like a cash spigot. And more sceptical of my 17-year-old nephew’s hot tip for a gaming company that crashed soon after I had invested in it.
Perhaps because he’s a millennial, owning stuff is not Sethi’s default setting, nor ostentation his style. He thinks banks are, by and large, out to crush us, and makes a convincing argument for why we should question whose interests are being served by 30-year mortgages and high-interest leases on status vehicles. He rents his home and drives a 2005 Honda Accord. He describes cryptocurrencies as the Crocs of the finance world. He is the rare one percenter who wants to pay more tax.
But Sethi is no killjoy. He can do pleasure and frivolity like the best of us. When someone tweeted at him, “What’s the point of making money when you drive a Honda?” he shot back: “So, I can take all my money and spend it on luxury hotels and baby cashmere.” If a flight is longer than four hours, he’ll fly business. “It’s OK to spend extravagantly on the things you love,” he says. “That was something I didn’t learn growing up. We didn’t spend extravagantly. We couldn’t.
If you had known Ramit Sethi, a self-described “skinny Indian kid”, studying technology and psychology at Stanford University in the early 2000s, you might have been lucky enough to score an invite to one of the free financial sessions he offered to fellow students. Whether you turned up was another matter. “I would overhear friends talk about their fourth overdraft fee at the bank and I’d be, like, ‘Hey, I have this one-hour thing I do, just come on Tuesday night.