Money Expert: Buying A House Is A Mistake! Becoming Rich is Simple But You Won’t Do It!

**Steven Bartlett** (0:00)
Something we think about a lot in The Diary Of A CEO is distribution, because we could have the most interesting guests in the world and the most thought provoking conversation, but if nobody can find us, none of that really matters. And this logic applies to pretty much any business. Whatever you're selling, however good it is, distribution often is the determining factor of whether you win or whether you lose. And this is why it's interesting to me that so many vacation rental owners are essentially invisible to a huge chunk of their potential market without even realizing it. Let me explain. booking.com is one of the most downloaded travel apps in the world. And since 2010, it's helped over 1.8 billion vacation rental guests find places to stay. That's a huge pool of travelers actively looking for places to stay. So if you've got a vacation rental that isn't on booking.com, that means you're missing out on being seen by millions of travelers already searching their platform. Getting listed takes 15 minutes and nearly half of new hosts get their first booking within a week. If you need that kind of global reach for your listing, which I assume you do, then head to booking.com to start your listing today.

**Ben Felix** (1:00)
Renting versus owning a home is the biggest financial decision most people make in their life. So we're going to talk about all of the unrecoverable costs of owning a home, including property taxes, maintenance costs, which is the one that I think people underestimate the most. And then there's also emergency costs. I've got a whole stack of them, as well as a 5% rule to figure out if renting is a better financial decision.

**Steven Bartlett** (1:18)
We'll go through that. What else have we got?

**Ben Felix** (1:19)
So this is something that people just don't think enough about, which is the top 10 financial mistakes that I think people make. For example, tax planning opportunities. Like, there are simple things that people can do to minimize the amount of tax they're paying. We'll go through those.

**Steven Bartlett** (1:31)
Ben Felix's firm manages the money of more than 3,000 people, ranging from people with huge amounts of money and not so much money. His whole thesis is giving people money advice that is based on academic research.

**Ben Felix** (1:44)
Our brains, our psychology, absolutely gets in the way of making good long-term financial decisions.

**Steven Bartlett** (1:49)
And today, we're going to answer the big money questions like, what should I invest in?

**Ben Felix** (1:54)
A lot of people believe they need to have a lot of background information before they can start investing. But I would argue that people who know just a little bit, they will be better long-term investors. There's a ton of evidence supporting that this will outperform most other investment strategies.

**Steven Bartlett** (2:07)
And also, what is the mentality, the mindset of people that end up making money over the long term?

**Ben Felix** (2:13)
Psychology is important for determining what your financial goals are. So this is a framework that we developed to elicit higher quality goals.

**Steven Bartlett** (2:20)
What would you say to young people that are thinking about their financial strategy?

**Ben Felix** (2:23)
A lot of young people feel a lot of pressure to save. But there is research suggesting that it's probably suboptimal for young people to save, which we'll talk more about later.

**Steven Bartlett** (2:31)
And then in a world of AI where everything is changing so quickly, what should I be doing with my money right now? Ben Felix has the answer. Guys, I've got a favour to ask before this episode begins. The algorithm, if you follow a show, will deliver you the best episodes from that show very prominently in your feed. So when we have our best episodes on this show, the most shared episodes, the most rated episodes, I would love you to know. And the simple way for you to know that is to hit that follow button. But also it's the simple, easy, free thing that you can do to help us make this show better. I would be hugely grateful if you could take a minute on the app you're listening to this on right now and hit that follow button. Thank you so, so, so much.
Ben, there are lots of people out in the world talking about personal finance and investing in all these adjacent subjects. What is the approach you take that you think is different to lots of the other sort of finance experts that are on YouTube that are giving people advice?

**Ben Felix** (3:35)
What I think in the approach that I've always tried to take is what can we take from academic literature, very smart people who spent a lot of time thinking about these things, what can we take from them and apply to making good financial decisions for a typical person?