Bram Stoker is responsible for a lot of modern vampire characteristics. From garlic warding them off to driving a stake into a vampire’s heart, that’s all in the popular imagination because of Stoker. Another interesting aspect of Stoker’s Dracula is how he enters into his victims’ lives. Dracula cannot sneak through an open window and start sucking your blood. He must be invited in. All of the garlic and crucifixes in the world are unnecessary as long as you remain vigilant and don’t let him in. But Dracula is clever. He’s not going to show up and ask if he can come in and get a quick bloody Mary (if your name is actually Mary). Vampiric influence is similar to bad financial influences. Both have to invited in and both drain something, whether that’s blood or our bank accounts. If we wouldn’t invite in a vampire, why invite in bad financial influences into our lives?
The Unexpected Bad Influence
Part of what made Dracula so successful is that no one expected a vampire to be living in London. Yes, London. In Bram Stoker’s Dracula, he moves to London from Transylvania. The people of London’s lack of awareness creates opportunity for Dracula. Likewise, not realizing risks or biases can lead us into financial peril. And so the first step to avoiding bad financial influences is to be on alert. And that these influences can be very enticing. For example, Bob has a friend who’s seemingly made a ton of money buying and selling crappy crypto coins. And now, he’s excitedly telling Bob about a new coin that he bought into that’s blowing up. So Bob hastily dumps some money in to try to get in on the action. But whoops! It was a scam the whole time and the coin is now worthless. Bob lost all the money he put into it.
Bob invited in a bad influence on the promise of massive crypto gains. This exact scenario is shockingly common in the crypto space. Just check out this monster list of failed coins and see how many are due to being a scam. Even the mainstream news sites publish articles about people making millions with weird crypto coins, increasing FOMO. This fear that everyone is making money on this but us (they’re not) is a bad financial influence that we’d be better off not letting in.
Where Do They Come From?
I gave two potential sources for bad financial influences: your friends and the mainstream media outlets. It’s truly unfortunate that we often cannot trust our friends or our media to consistently give wise financial advice. But let’s talk about the worst place to get financial advice: social media. Just go online and search “tiktok bad financial advice” or “twitter bad financial advice” if you want to see examples. The amount of terrible opinions and advice that people give is astounding. Now a lot of it involves people trying to get you to fall for a scam, but the terrible advice coming out of sincerity is baffling as well. With seemingly everyone on social media these days (and so many young people consuming the toxic refuse that is TikTok), financially damaging advice is able to reach more people than ever. Trusting social media financial advice is like personally going to Transylvania and picking Dracula up in your car.
Recognizing Dracula Through Education, Vigilance, and Professional Help
When Dracula comes to your door, you want to recognize him and turn him away. The first step is education. Luckily you don’t have to go searching through ancient tomes to learn about personal finance. There are plenty of reliable ways to educate yourself. For the very basics of saving and paying off debt, I do think that Dave Ramsey is someone who is accessible and sensible. Want to learn about investing? Try reading The Simple Path to Wealth by JL Collins (affiliate link). That’s pretty much where I started. Once you learn the basics, it’s easier to pick out advice that seems wrong.
Vigilance involves monitoring some of our own biases, but especially personal greed. Like Bob and his sorry foray into cryptocurrency, it’s easy to get swept up in the fervor of a bull run. It’s more difficult to remain true to our investing plan and don’t go off course chasing returns. The FOMO in the investing world is 100% greed driven. We naturally want to squeeze every last gain from an investment, but that can lead to financial ruin. Finding what is Enough in every area of our lives is important, but finding what is Enough in our investing life helps us to manage our risk better and avoid catastrophe.
The final way you can avoid Dracula is through professional help. You can have your own personal Van Helsing to help you spot and overcome the financial bad influences in the form of a financial advisor. I have a pretty simple financial situation and enjoy the process of learning about personal finance. But it is more than okay to seek out a financial advisor if personal finance or investing is overwhelming to you. A licensed fiduciary is legally required to act in your best interest (like an accountant or a lawyer is). So if you’re stuck or need help getting started, seeing one of these folks is a great first step.
It's Not Too Late
You may realize at some point that you’ve come under some bad financial influence. That’s okay, it happens to the best of us. Even if it’s a bit painful or not ideal, it is possible to overcome the bad influences. You can reform your personal finances and chart a better course. Heck, I’ve realized things that I needed to fix in my personal finances and I have a blog! (What do you mean anyone can start a blog?) My point is that personal finance mistakes are easy to make. By recognizing bad influences before they induce us towards financial blunders, we can ensure fewer self-inflicted financial head aches in the future.
