Author
Ramit Sethi
The writer who replaced the budget with an automatic system, and guilt with a plan for spending on what you love.
1 book on BookYol
The story and the impact
Ramit Sethi started the blog I Will Teach You to Be Rich in 2004 while a student at Stanford, writing about personal finance for people his own age who found the existing advice preachy and impractical.
The book of the same name was published in 2009 and revised in 2019, laying out a six-week programme for setting up accounts, writing a conscious spending plan, automating transfers, paying off debt and investing in low-cost funds. It became a long-running bestseller.
He later hosted the Netflix series How to Get Rich in 2023, runs a podcast in which couples discuss their money, and published Money for Couples, applying the same system to two people sharing an account.
The signature
Sethi writes in the second person, with scripts for phone calls and screenshots of accounts, and treats personal finance as engineering rather than virtue. His signature is the sentence that sounds like permission and is discipline: spend extravagantly on the things you love, and cut costs mercilessly on the things you don't.