I have two thoughts on the matter: 1. I tend to be pretty wary of assuming that poor people make poor financial decisions because they don’t know any better. O

I have two thoughts on the matter: 1. I tend to be pretty wary of assuming that poor people make poor financial decisions because they don’t know any better. Often their choices may be sensible given the circumstances or better options may not be available. See: http://www.businessinsider.com/check-cashing-stores-good-deal-upenn-professor-2017-2 http://www.businessinsider.com/check-cashing-stores-good-dea... which has some US examples (going to a check-casher is expensive but you get money immediately, which can be important for paying bills if you live paycheck-to-paycheck, and you don’t risk expensive overdraft fees—these don’t apply so much in the U.K. where overdraft fees are less insane and electronic payments typically come in faster, but a separate advantage to cash is having more control over money) 2. For wealthier people, I think it is hard to get good advice. Most people in financial services will be trying to make a profit, people you work with/know personally are unlikely to have truly good advice as they have similar problems getting it to you, and there is little media interest in repeating basically the same bits of advice every week. If you listen to Money Box (a radio programme about personal finance in the U.K.) then you may get the impression that the sensible way to invest is by finding obscure lucrative schemes that aren’t scams rather than going for simple broad-ranged ETFs or Index funds (or maybe talk about savings accounts or REITs.) This is because each episode typically contains some discussion of changing laws (regarding tax) or some kind of scam/fraud that some people fell for. It is probably good to put pressure on such schemes and if some listener writes to the show about one, the reporting often leads to them being reimbursed. But little thought is given to why people fall for them and what one should do to avoid them. For example, there was a case of someone who wanted a really really safe investment and went for making loans to (or maybe buying bonds from) some dodgy German company that was apparently building luxury houses in Turkey, and offering a return over 10%. The lesson here is that high returns tend to correspond to high risk, scams tend to promise high returns (at low risk), scams tend not to sell liquid products, and the listener should probably have bought gilts or some investment grade fixed income ETF/mutual fund. But none of that gets discussed (I think partly it is generally difficult to publish general investing advice) and one gets the impression that it is easy to fall for such scams in the ordinary process of investing. I also like Matt Levine’s tongue-in-cheek suggestions for improving personal finance: brokerages should have “technical difficulties” during a market crash and anything other than simple investments in diversified products (and maybe single stocks) requires getting a “stupid investment certificate” which involves being slapped in the face by a civil servant and promising not to tell the New York Times that you didn’t know what you were getting into)