Ramit Sethi on the Small Choices Behind Big Financial Disasters
I Will Teach You To Be Rich
In this video, Ramit Sethi reacts to financial horror stories posted on TikTok and Reddit. Sethi argues that many financial disasters don't begin with one huge, obvious mistake but with smaller decisions and missed warning signs, and uses each story to show how people slowly get trapped.
Chasing Interest on a Crypto Platform: The Celsius Story
The first story comes from a TikTok creator who calls her worst financial decision moving all of her Bitcoin out of Robinhood and rebuying it on Celsius. Celsius paid users weekly interest: it lent out deposited Bitcoin and split the earnings with depositors. At one point, she says, she was earning $700 a week just from holding Bitcoin there, and she kept buying more as the price rose. She acknowledges the crypto saying "not your keys, not your Bitcoin": crypto held on a third-party app doesn't fully belong to you, and she knew things could go wrong. Then Celsius filed for bankruptcy and paused transfers for most users indefinitely. She had more than one full Bitcoin on the platform, an amount she had spent a few years working toward and was proud of reaching, and she can no longer get it out.
Sethi calls it a tough story, since people don't expect the place they store their crypto to go bankrupt. But he takes it as another sign that many crypto participants don't understand "the game being played around them." In his view, they are entering a system that lacks the regulations of a normal bank like Chase.
He also sees a gambling mentality in moving money from one place to another to earn slightly more interest. Sethi says he has never liked chasing interest. His standing advice is to pick a good high-yield savings account and stay with it rather than switching for an extra 0.02%, which he doesn't think is worth much. The $700 a week sounds impressive, he concedes, but "everybody sounds like a genius when things are going up exponentially." He brings in Warren Buffett's line, "When the tide goes out, you can see who was swimming naked," as a description of what happens to people engaged in high-risk gambling they disguise as investing.
An Inheritance, a Lien, and a House Being Pushed by a Mountain
The second story comes from Reddit. The poster's cousin spent her entire inheritance and took out a lien on her existing home to buy a second home in the mountains. The house was literally being pushed over by the mountain, and the cousin and her partner believed they could fix it. When the poster visited, every door jamb was crooked and the doors wouldn't close. In the basement, the couple were installing I-beams to, in their words, "stop the mountain from pushing on the home." The poster thought this wouldn't solve anything.
Six months later the couple asked the poster for $50,000 and were refused. A year later the house collapsed. According to the post, they now owe more than $300,000 on a home that no longer exists. Because they used their original home as collateral and couldn't get insurance on the second one, missing payments would cost them their first house too. The poster puts the total loss at upwards of $700,000.
Sethi's first reaction is that sometimes people make bad decisions and pay the price. His broader point is about impulsivity. Buying ten bags of Skittles on a whim leaves you with a stomach ache for a few days. The striking thing, he says, is that people seem just as impulsive with purchases costing hundreds of thousands of dollars. As an example, he points to the housing mania around 2021, when some buyers skipped inspections and later found they had to spend $150,000 on maintenance. Others watched markets cool: he cites Austin as down 20% from its peak and other cities down by double-digit percentages.
He connects this to how much people avoid thinking about what could go wrong. Many describe themselves as "eternal optimists," but Sethi says there is a fine line between optimism and delusion. Big purchases require managing risk, and if you don't know what that means, he says, you aren't ready to buy a house, and certainly not a second one.
A $7,000 Business Coach That Didn't Help
The third story is a TikTok from a former online fitness coach. From 2020 to 2022 she ran a full business with employees, an assistant coach, and at one point around 70 clients. She describes constant pressure in that world to "invest in yourself" and your business, which she says she doesn't disagree with, though the expected investments grow more expensive as a business advances. When her business was slowing down, she spent $7,000 on a business coach, and that was a discounted price. Her goal was to outsource sales so she could focus on social media and coaching her remaining clients. Looking back, she can't remember making any concrete moves with the coach. The main advice she recalls is that she should go to therapy. She notes the $7,000 could have been a car down payment.
Sethi first comments on the creator's long opening disclaimer, asking why people start videos with so many caveats instead of getting to the point. On the substance, he says he knows many people in the business coaching industry and that a few are good. The problem, as he sees it, is that there's no barrier to entry: anyone can call themselves a coach. He describes getting daily DMs from self-styled coaches with tiny followings offering him tips on his YouTube channel.
He then turns to the people who hire coaches and says many of them are "delusional" about how coaching works. They pay $7,000 or $50,000, treat the payment as large, and expect the coach to fix things. Sethi argues that a good coaching experience requires being coachable yourself. People spend a lot of energy looking for the right book or coach while not being coachable themselves. His example: an entrepreneur who expects someone else to handle sales is probably not going to get that for a while.
Losing $100,000 on "Bad Trades"
The final story is a Reddit post asking how to get over financial losses. Earlier in the year, the poster made trades in what they called a poor attempt to get rich quick, in the style of WallStreetBets. The trades cost them a year of savings, $100,000. They've since tried to move on and keep investing monthly. They write that grief over the loss has been consuming them, especially knowing that almost anything else they could have invested in has recovered, while they're still down 30%.
Sethi cuts in at the word "trades." He says the poster wasn't trading but gambling, and should stop. He suggests pain can be a useful teacher for some people. He points to the top comment, which advises against getting over the loss: keep it fresh to avoid repeating it, and with each paycheck remember that at least you're now buying index funds instead of being dumb like before. Sethi says this is how men talk to each other. He recalls a hard leg workout where he told his trainer he felt like he was going to throw up, and the trainer told him to just do it after the workout. Sometimes, he says, people need someone to tell them to feel the pain.
But he adds that compassion matters too, because people aren't motivated merely by being called dumb. His advice is to rewrite the story in an empowering way: "In the past I was impulsive, I participated in get-rich-quick activities, and deep down I wanted to make a lot of money without working a lot. Now I realize that to build real wealth I need to consistently invest in low-cost investments like index funds and be patient." That structure, who I was then and who I am now, is how Sethi recommends moving forward. He is fine with an occasional joke about being dumb, but tells the poster to get off some of these subreddits and focus on a new identity and a new chapter.
Small Worries Versus Big Avoided Decisions
To close, Sethi draws a broader lesson. He says these stories remind him how easy it is to spend years focused on the wrong financial things. People obsess over saving $5 on WD-40 while avoiding decisions that would change the trajectory of their financial lives. He says he has seen people feel guilty about ordering a second appetizer while staying in jobs that underpay them by $30,000 a year. He calls this human: small decisions feel safe, while bigger ones are harder and more amorphous, yet the bigger ones usually change your financial life.
He ends with an exercise. Open a notes app and make two columns. In one, write what you spend a weird amount of time worrying about financially. In the other, write the biggest financial decisions you've been avoiding. Sethi says the gap between the small things consuming your attention and the big decisions that actually matter shows where to redirect your energy.
A lot of financial disasters do not start with one huge mistake. Often it's something small. Today I'm reacting to financial horror stories from TikTok, Reddit, and all around the internet. As we go through these stories, I want to break down how people are slowly getting trapped, and the warning signs that they're missing, so that you don't miss the same warning signs yourself. Let's dive in.
The worst financial decision you've ever made, because some people would say that mine is investing money into an apartment that I don't own, but actually the worst financial decision I ever made was taking all of the Bitcoin that I had in Robinhood, selling it, and then rebuying it in Celsius a few years ago. Because Celsius, if you stored your Bitcoin on their app, they would pay you interest weekly, because they would take your Bitcoin and lend it out to people, and pay you interest on top of that, split their earnings with you.
So at one point I was making $700 a week just by having my Bitcoin in there, and I continued to buy Bitcoin because Bitcoin was going up, and I was so excited, and I was making all this money, and I was like, "This is so great, I'm gonna have so much money!" But you know what they say? Not your keys, not your Bitcoin.
If you store your crypto on a third-party app, it doesn't actually fully belong to you. Things can happen. Things can happen, and I knew that things could happen. So anyway, Celsius filed for bankruptcy. It paused transfers for most people indefinitely. I cannot get my money out. I have more than a full Bitcoin in there. I was so proud of myself when I worked my way up to a full Bitcoin. It took me a few years, but I got there, and now that money isn't mine anymore, and you just have to laugh.
This is a tough story because you don't expect a place you store your crypto to go bankrupt. That's insane. One more reason that people who are involved in crypto do not understand the game being played around them. You are effectively walking into a system that does not have the same regulations as your normal Chase bank.
I also think there is a bit of a gambling mentality going on here. The idea that, "Hey, let me just move my money over from here to here so I can make a little bit more interest." I've never liked chasing interest. That's why I tell people, pick a good high-yield savings account and stick with it. Don't jump around because you get 0.02% more. It's not really worth that much.
Yeah, 700 bucks sounds like a lot. Everybody sounds like a genius when things are going up exponentially. But the quote that I thought she was going to say is Warren Buffett's quote, which is, "When the tide goes out, you can see who was swimming naked." And that is what happens to a lot of people who engage in high-risk gambling, which they disguise as investing.
I think people love to talk about buying back their time more than they actually like to buy back their time. One way that I buy back my time is using a service called DeleteMe, today's sponsor. They are a hands-free subscription service that goes out and removes your personal information from hundreds of data broker and people search sites that profit from your data, and they keep monitoring it over time.
I actually bought DeleteMe for myself and for my parents because I know that parents tend to be even more vulnerable to their information being sold online. And DeleteMe is the best in the business. They've been the leading expert in personally identifiable information removal for over 15 years. Wirecutter recently named them the number one data removal service.
When I log into the DeleteMe dashboard, I can see the reports, which sites had my info, what they found, phone, address, relatives, and confirmation that it's been removed. And that is time and energy that I am buying back because I don't have to manually play whack-a-mole with these shady websites. It's basically impossible to do it on your own anyway.
So if you want to buy back your time and take control of your identity online, go to joindeleteme.com/ramit and use code RAMIT at checkout for 20% off a plan for you or your entire family. You can also click the link in the description below.
My cousin spent 100% of her inheritance and took out a lien on her home to buy a second home in the mountains. Thing is, it was being pushed over by a mountain and they thought they could fix it. I went and saw it and every door jamb was crooked and the doors wouldn't shut. Is this a joke?
Okay. They took me down into the basement and they were trying to use I-beams to, quote, "Stop the mountain from pushing on the home." I was just like, "What the hell are you doing? That won't solve anything." Fast forward six months and they asked me for 50K to help and I declined. Fast forward a year and the home collapsed. Now they owe over $300,000 for a home that doesn't exist. And if they don't make the payments, they lose their other house too because they used the original home as collateral and could not get insurance on the second home. Total money lost, upwards of 700K.
What am I going to tell you? Sometimes people make bad decisions and then you got to pay the price. There's a lot of impulsivity with people. "Oh, I want to buy Skittles. I buy 10 bags of Skittles." All right. You got a stomach ache for a couple of days, whatever. But the crazy thing is people seem to be similarly impulsive around purchases that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Remember back in 2021 or so? "I'm going to buy a house. This is going crazy." No inspection. There was a mania going on and many of those people discovered they have to spend $150,000 on maintenance or the market has cooled considerably in cities like Austin, down 20% from the peak. Other cities down double-digit percentages.
Not much to say here. A lot of us do not like to think about what happens if things go wrong. A lot of people are what they call eternal optimists. There's a fine line between being optimistic and delusional. And when it comes to big purchases, you need to manage risk. And if you don't know what that means, you are not ready to buy a house. Definitely not a second house. I wish them the best of luck. It's going to be a tough time going ahead.
Most people think money is just numbers, but then you watch how people actually behave with money and you realize it's incredibly emotional. I don't blame you. Money is tied up with shame and relationships and identity and fear and ego, all of it. That's what I talk about on this channel. So if you want to go deeper than spreadsheets and learn how your money psychology works, click subscribe to join me here on this channel.
Story time about one of the worst financial decisions I've ever made. Disclaimer, this is not bashing anyone. Okay. No one. I have no hard feelings, no hate, no drama from.
Why do people start their videos with all these caveats? Can we get to the point?
2020 to 2022, I was an online fitness coach and I had a full-blown business. I had employees. I had an assistant coach. At one point we probably had like 70 clients and I loved it. I loved it so much, but there was always this pressure to, quote-unquote, invest in yourself and invest in your business, which I do not disagree with. The more advanced you get in your business, the more you are encouraged to invest and the more expensive it gets. So I decided to spend, I'm cringing saying this, $7,000 on a business coach and that was discounted. And it did absolutely nothing for me.
So at the point of investing in this coach, my business was kind of slowing down and I really needed help with just picking it back up. And I wanted to get to the point where I could not have to do the sales part anymore. So that was my end goal, was I really wanted to outsource the sales portion of the coaching. I really wanted to do just the social media and coach my few clients that I had.
And that business coach really didn't do anything for me at all. Looking back, I really don't remember making any moves with her at all about anything. She told me I needed to go to therapy and that's about it. And the fact that I spent $7,000 on that, that could have been a down payment for a car.
I know a lot of the people in the business coaching industry. There's a few that are good. The problem is anyone can call themselves a coach. I want to identify a couple of issues here. First of all, there's no barrier to entry. So there's guys who barely graduated high school who call themselves a bit. I'm not joking. They DM me every day.
They literally say to me, "Hey, Ramit, I saw that you've been doing okay on YouTube, but I have a couple tips for you." I'm trying to be polite because I'm in my forties and I'm trying to be graceful and all that stuff. But I'm like, "Who the are you, bro? You have 23 followers. In what world is this happening right now?"
I also want to point something out about the people who hire business coaches. A lot of you are delusional. You go to a business coach and you basically say, "$7,000 or $50,000. This is a lot of money for me. Fix it." And that's not the way coaching works. You have to be coachable in order to have a great coaching experience. So many of us focus on finding the right book or the right coach, but we ourselves are not coachable. As an example, if you are an entrepreneur and you are expecting someone else to do sales for you, that's probably not going to happen for a while.
I find that people who have started on their personal finance journey sometimes do not know when they have done enough. They'll constantly ask, "What did I miss? I know I missed. I need to read 10 more subreddits. What about this one obscure thing that might happen?" And it doesn't feel good to constantly worry that you got something wrong. That is exactly why we created Road to $100K.
For most people, reaching your first $100,000 invested is a massive financial milestone. It's often the point where you stop feeling like you are guessing because you can finally see that the decisions you've made are really starting to add up. Inside Road to $100K, you will get a personalized path based on your actual numbers, not generic advice. You'll see exactly where you stand today, what's holding you back and what to focus on next. You will also get access to live coaching and a community of people working towards the same goal. If you are ready to start making real progress towards $100,000 invested, scan the QR code on screen or click the link below to learn about Road to $100K.
How do you get over financial losses? Earlier this year, made some bad trades. Stop right there. You're not trading. You're a gambler. Stop being a gambler.
Oh, I made some bad trades in a poor attempt to get rich quick. Think WallStreetBets. There you go. These trades cost me a year of savings, $100,000. Since then I've been trying to just move on and keep investing monthly, but the grief and disappointment of not having instead used the money to invest in quite literally anything, as almost everything recovered 30%, has been consuming me. If you've ever faced a similar situation, how did you deal with it?
Pain is a wonderful teacher for some people. Sometimes you need it. In fact, the top comment here says, "You shouldn't try to get over it. It needs to stay fresh in your mind. That way you won't be tempted to repeat it. Each paycheck you should think, at least I'll be buying index funds instead of being a dumb like before."
Okay, I got to tell you something. This is how guys talk to each other. Yesterday I was at the gym and I was doing a leg workout and it was unusually tough and we were towards the end of the workout and I told my trainer, "I feel like I'm going to puke." He goes, "Just puke after the workout." I was like, "That's great. What an answer." I was like, "Let's get it." Sometimes you need somebody to just be like, "Hey, you should feel this pain."
I do think that we should add a little bit of compassion as well because people are not merely motivated by being called dumb. It is important to realize that you can write your story. Your story can say, "In the past I was impulsive, I participated in get-rich-quick activities and deep down I really wanted to make a lot of money without working a lot. Now I realize that if I want to build real wealth, I need to consistently invest in low-cost investments like index funds and be patient."
That's how you rewrite your story to be empowering. Here's what I was in the past. Here's who I am today. That's how you do it. So I don't mind a little joke here and there about being a dumb, but you need to get off of some of these subreddits and you need to focus on the new identity and new chapter of your life.
One thing these financial horror stories remind me is how easy it is to spend years focusing on the wrong things financially. People will obsess over saving $5 on WD-40. Meanwhile, they will avoid decisions that would alter the trajectory of their financial lives. I have seen people feel guilty about ordering a second appetizer while staying in jobs that underpay them by $30,000 a year. I'm just like, "What?"
But that's human because small decisions feel safe. The bigger ones are harder. They're more amorphous, but those are usually the ones that change your financial life. So I'm going to give you an exercise to do right now. Open up a little notes app on your computer or your phone and make two columns. On one side, I want you to write, "What do I spend a weird amount of time worrying about financially?" And on the other side, I want you to write, "What are the biggest financial decisions that I've been avoiding?"
You're going to see that gap between the tiny things that are consuming your attention and the bigger decisions that actually matter, and that's when you can start focusing your energy on what you want to change. If you want to learn how to build real wealth without making money your entire personality, I want you to watch the exact playbook to go from zero to your first $100,000 next.
Article published · Updated