On a recent afternoon I met with Ramit Sethi, a popular personal finance guru, at a Southeast Asian restaurant in downtown Manhattan. The interview wasn't going well. Sethi, who is 29 years old and Indian American, is inscrutable. He doesn't smile often. His eyebrows, thick and slanted down toward the bridge of his nose, give him a stern look. Over vegetable curry I asked him about his childhood, and he told me that he didn't remember much. He shrugged off my questions about his hobbies and his aspirations. It wasn't until the end of our lunch, when I reached for my debit card, that his eyes lit up.
"Show me!" he barked, pointing at my wallet. When he spotted the Bank of America (BAC) logo peeking out of the billfold, he threw up his hands, appalled. "Oh, my God," he said.
I cringed. The debit card offers meager rewards. It is linked to a checking account that requires a minimum balance, locking up my money for a paltry interest rate. The bank was threatening at the time to slap me with a $5 monthly fee. As I yanked my wallet back, Sethi laughed with delight.
I should have seen it coming. Ramit Sethi is the enfant terrible of the personal finance world. Since starting his website, iwillteachyoutoberich.com, in 2004 as a Stanford undergrad, he has built a cult following. Nearly 200,000 people subscribe to his newsfeed. His book, also called I Will Teach You to Be Rich, rocketed to No. 1 on Amazon the day it came out. He sells online courses that cost upward of $1,000 and pulls in more than $1 million a year.
Sethi's advice isn't terribly unusual: He wants young people to slash their debt, invest for retirement, and increase their earning power. It's his approach that makes him different. Unlike most people in the self-help business, Sethi eschews fuzzy affirmations in favor of specific directives. His tips are based on careful testing and paired with musings on the mysteries of human behavior. His technocratic style is similar to that of Tim Ferriss, author of the smash hit productivity guide The 4-Hour Workweek. Like Ferriss, Sethi specializes in coming up with simple tweaks -- or hacks, as productivity junkies call them -- that his readers can apply to their lives.
Sethi and Ferriss are good friends. "There are a handful of people who are very analytical and good at testing and have, almost as a side effect, built these personal brands," says Ferriss. "Ramit is one."
And yet, after I paid for my lunch with my scorned debit card, I found myself puzzled by Sethi's popularity. For a guru, he isn't very charismatic: He is distant, not warm, and comes across as more taskmaster than mentor.
But that may be why his readers, chiefly Millennials in their twenties and early thirties, adore him. They say they are tired of being pandered to by experts twice their age. Max Cantor, a 26-year-old programmer from Cleveland, says he admires the blogger's willingness to alienate people. Cantor once e-mailed Sethi a question, only to see his query appear in an I Will Teach You to Be Rich newsletter as the subject of mockery. "He's kind of a dick, right?" Cantor says with a laugh.
