That Money Advice Was Good. It Was Just Written for Somebody Else.

You've heard both of these, probably from people you respect. Never borrow a dime. And, debt is how everything big gets built. Pay the house off early. And, don't rush to pay off the cheapest loan you'll ever have. Both sides delivered with total confidence, and here's the part that took me years to see. Both sides can be right. Just not about the same person.

Advice arrives sounding universal. It never is. Every piece of it came off somebody's actual life, their income, their decade, their risks, the thing they were building toward, and it fits people shaped like the life that made it. So before any piece of money advice can be right, it has to match three things, who you are, where you are, and where you're trying to go. Miss any one of the three and good advice starts doing damage.

I build houses, so here's how I hold it. The best set of plans I've ever seen is still wrong for the lot next door. Different grade, different setbacks, different street. Nobody blames the architect. The plans weren't bad. They were drawn for different ground.

Walk the three and you'll see how much they carry. Who you are is your temperament and your obligations, because there's the person who can watch a number fall and do nothing, and the person who can't, and the same portfolio is right for one and wrong for the other. It's also how much of the work you actually want, because you can drive a thing yourself, hand it off completely, or land somewhere between, and the same investment can be a second job or a statement in the mail depending on which one you are. Where you are is your decade and your balance sheet, because the move that builds someone at thirty can break someone at sixty, and both of them heard it from the same podcast. And where you're trying to go decides everything else, because the same dollars get pointed at completely different lives, and advice that doesn't know your destination is navigating somebody else's trip.

I watch this up close. Two people can match on paper, same decade give or take a few years, same income range, same state, and still need opposite answers, because underneath the matching numbers sit different goals, different stomachs for risk, different calendars, and different appetites for the work. On the surface they're twins. Underneath, they're two different builds.

Here's why almost nobody checks the fit. The people handing you advice are speaking from the only life they've lived, which is honest, and it's all any of us can do. And confidence sounds like universality. The more sure the voice, the more it sounds like it applies to everyone, and sureness was never proof of fit. And most of what reaches you now was aimed before it was written. The internet's money advice gets built for an avatar, the high earner in the high tax state, the founder, the new parent, and if you match the avatar, it feels like it was written for you. Sometimes it was. But an avatar is a category, and you are not a category, and the neighbor who matches the same avatar can still need the opposite answer.

So the move is short, and it works on every confident sentence that reaches you, from the podcast, the dinner table, the smartest person you know. Before you take it, check the label it never comes with. Built by whom, for someone with what obligations, in which decade, headed where. If the answers rhyme with your life, take it seriously. If they don't, it can be brilliant and still not be yours. It's also why the letters here, this one included, teach ideas and never hand out to-do lists. The ideas travel. The to-do list has to be yours.

The next confident sentence that reaches you might be completely right. Just ask the only question that decides it. Right for who, standing where, headed where?

Talk Friday.

— Mateo