The Best Ways To Build Your Personal Wealth - Nick Maggiulli

... concentrate to get rich but diversify to stay rich. I think you can get relatively rich through diversification. I don't think you need to concentrate. For most people, they're probably going to be fine, have a great life, live a decent life with that type of lifestyle. And it's much easier than trying to concentrate and then you get hit with some crazy risk and then you lose more money or something. You know, it's really tough that way. (air whooshing)

The world of personal finance I find quite interesting because it's similar to diet in that everybody needs to eat. Similarly, everybody needs to have money and earn money, and yet it seems like there is no widely accepted wisdom about the single best way to construct your financial life. I understand people have different requirements, but it does kind of surprise me a little bit that it's still so contested even though everybody should have an opinion on it.

Yeah, definitely. I think it's contested for a host of reasons because I really don't think there's, like, one right way to do it. And I kind of... You know, I've discussed this a little bit. Like, there's that, uh, I think that line from Anna Karenina which is like, you know, "All happy families are the same, but all unhappy families are unhappy in their own way." Well, it's kind of the reverse in wealth management, which is... Or start with, like, building wealth. Like, there's, like, only a few ways you can go broke, but there's a lot of different ways you can get rich, right? There's people who got rich in real estate. There's people who got rich buying stocks, individual stocks, you know, index funds, you know, you can name it, farmland, whatever. There's a lot of ways people get rich, but everyone goes broke one of, like, a couple ways. It's usually high risk, high spending, or leverage, or some mix of those things there that usually causes it. So that's kind of how I look at the world. So I think that's why it's contested, because there's real estate people saying, "You have to own real estate. You have to do this." And there's stock market investors saying, "No, real estate's dumb. I don't want to waste time doing that. The hassle of a, of frozen... the pipe that bursts." And there's always that same tale, right? And I think they're both wrong. I think there's both... There's pluses and minuses and everyone has their biases, and I can get into mine, but I think that's why it's contested.

Yeah, you're probably right. What do you think are the biggest myths in personal finance? I've only a couple of times, uh, dropped into Fin Twitter, which I didn't even know was a thing.

(laughs)

Um, but I've been CC'd in a couple of times, and it's a, it's a complete cesspool. Um, so yeah, talk to me about the biggest myths that exist in personal finance.