Hacker News Reader

Comment by recursive | Hacker News Reader

How do you get trustworthy information? I'm basically financially illiterate, but I'm not really happy about it. I'm interested in learning, but how? Everyone's trying to sell me something. I don't know how to establish credibility of a source. And I'm not keen to take financial advice from an arbitrary source, since there's often a distinct incentive to give bad advice.

View on HN

The best resource I've found is Reddit's personal finance forum, and specifically their "How to Handle Money" guide - especially the flowchart and "simplified flowchart".

https://www.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/wiki/commontopics

I've found a lot of other great individual articles, but no other "how do I even start?" resource with much value.

The intelligent investor by Ben Graham. He's long dead, so no conflits of interests.

I think the best thing to do is look at each transaction separately, read a few sources, and reflect on what made sense, what the sources were all agreement about, and what seemed like a pitch.

Consumer advocacy agencies usually have excellent advice. Credit unions seem to have well-intentioned advice but the information can be incomplete.

E.g if you're about to buy a car, read a few articles about getting car loans, don't just take the dealership finance person at their word.

I've been meaning to get around to making a decision tree for technical people who never had to bother with this stuff but I don't know how much time I need to dedicate to "please don't buy a jetski if you're unemployed".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com