How I vet online financial advice as a financial educator

4 questions I ask as a journalist, educator, activist and person dealing with money to decide when a financial move is right for me.

The way I teach people to make financial decisions is always riddled with caveats. That’s because our financial circumstances and needs are each unique, and there’s no one right answer for everyone. Instead of claiming to have the best answers, I generally recommend you educate yourself so you’re armed with the information you need to make decisions that are right for you.

But even that comes with a caveat. We have access to a vast array of information about money online — an enormous privilege — but so much of it is mired in budget culture ideology that’ll lead you astray. Or it’s just plain inaccurate.

So I’m going to talk about how I vet personal finance information I find online. I’ll use an example a friend recently shared with me: a piece of advice from a publication called “Notes from the Apocalypse” about participating in a tax strike to resist fascism. And I’ll contrast it to a piece on the same topic I read a few months ago on “Queer & Trans Wealth.”

I don’t have an opinion on whether anyone should or shouldn’t abstain from taxes as resistance; that’s something you have to determine for yourself. But this topic is a great example to talk about online information literacy, because:

• It’s the kind of thing many of us have never heard or thought about before.

• There’s no formal education on the subject.

• It can easily pique your interest by appealing to your ideology.

With such an unusual and controversial topic¹, how do you know you’re getting good information to guide your decisions?

Here are the four main questions I ask myself to figure that out.

1. Where does this information come from?

Thinking like a journalist, the first question I ask is “Where does this information come from?”

This goes for anything, not only financial advice. But especially when you’re reading some kind of advice, know the source.

In this case, I’m vetting three layers of sources:

• The publication.

• The author.

• Where the author got their information.

Publication

As a publication, “Notes from the Apocalypse” (NFTA) is apparently documenting the experience of watching fascists try to run our country. Beyond that, there’s no information about who writes it or their possible expertise or experience. For the most part, that’s not important to this publication, because it doesn’t usually dole out advice.

Author

In this guest post, though, the author is giving advice (though they say clearly, “This isn’t financial advice. It’s resistance logistics,” which is responsible and wise). I don’t see any information to suggest this author is an authority in personal finance or activism, but I can tell from their profile that our values are probably aligned.

Expertise is an important thing to look for, especially for financial advice, but really for any advice. Do you have reason to believe this source knows things about the subject matter? This question is the reason I have a certification as a financial educator in addition to my experience as a financial journalist; those letters after my name quickly let readers know I’ve at least studied this stuff enough to pass a test.

Sources

But, as a journalist, I also know writers don’t have to be experts in a subject to offer useful advice. They can cite sources to let you know the information they’re sharing is legitimate. Leo Aquino at “Queer & Trans Wealth” (QTW) does a great job of this in their piece, citing not only organizations that specialize in war tax resistance but also commonly recognized financial authorities including the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and Forbes.

NFTA, in contrast, doesn’t cite any outside sources. I know enough about taxes and about our current federal government to know they’re not pulling ideas out of thin air. But a push for an unorthodox and scary financial move needs to come with receipts, and their post doesn’t have them.

That doesn’t mean you have to discard the advice immediately. It means you have to do more research on your own, because this isn’t an authoritative source. It’s just a starting point.

2. What are the consequences?

Based on what I know as a financial educator, the next question I ask about financial advice is “What are the consequences?”

This is the question I recommend in You Don’t Need a Budget as a useful place to start before making any financial move, because it’s neutral. It’s not asking “Is this a good or bad choice?” It’s asking “What could happen if I did this?” And, once you know that answer, “Am I OK with that happening?”

For financial decisions, I’m talking about the consequences for you. (We’ll talk next about the external impact.) Participating in a tax strike — i.e. not paying your federal income taxes — means having tax debt. Aquino lays out the details of that well in their piece; the most salient consequences are the possibilities of wage garnishment or asset seizure to cover the debt (which the government can initiate without a lawsuit first).

Asking this question and learning the real answer is vital to making a sound decision. Budget culture is full of bad information rooted in shame that keeps people afraid and maintains the status quo. For example, a lot of people assume they’ll be arrested for tax debt, but, as Aquino notes and many experts have assured me, that’s a remote possibility.

Carrying around that kind of fear can seriously skew your decisions. Knowing the realistic possible consequences lets you prepare for them like you would any other change to your financial situation — in this case, Aquino suggests, filing tax returns even when you don’t intend to pay the bill.

3. What kind of impact will this have?

As someone who wants to see a lot of change in the world, the question I ask when someone proposes an action intended to make change is “What kind of impact will this (actually) have?”

The proposed goal of the tax strike NFTA describes is to cut off funding for the horrific actions endorsed in the federal budget Congress recently approved. But the government doesn’t rely on cash flow the way a household does. It issues its own money and can borrow in the form of bonds when it needs more. It doesn’t rely on the money out of your paycheck this week to fund its current activities. Refusing to pay your taxes under the Trump administration won’t drain the funding for its actions.

If enough people were to participate in a tax strike, it could put political pressure on those in government to redirect their priorities. But this government has already faced a lot of political pressure and has shown an unwillingness to respond to it.

Across the board, I’m usually not a fan of individual actions meant in response to systemic or collective problems. When the action looks risky, not enough people are willing to do it. That makes the impact on the system insignificant, while the individual takes on an unnecessary personal risk.

Don’t ever be discouraged by feeling too small to have an impact. But do make sure the action you’re being advised to take can actually have the impact you want to make.

4. Do I want to do this?

But there’s one more question you have to ask when making any decision. Considering whether advice comes from a wise source, how it’ll affect your finances and what systemic impact it could have are all important. But those, ultimately, are optimization questions. They help you decide whether this is an optimal decision for the desired outcome.

That’s how computer brains work. And you’re not a computer; you’re a person.

So, as a person, the final question is “Do I want to do this?”

This is the listening to your gut part of decision making. Regardless of the answers to the other questions, do you want to do this?

Sometimes a piece of advice reinforces something you’ve been thinking but couldn’t quite put into words. Maybe all you need are the words, and the source doesn’t matter.

Sometimes a move will have challenging financial consequences or force you to change your financial goals or expectations. It can still be the right move for you.

Sometimes an individual action can’t change — or even get noticed by — the system. Maybe you still don’t want the dollars you control to support genocide or concentration camps.

Maybe you can’t join protests or make phone calls or run for office or any of the other thousand things we’re offered as resistance, but you can control your money, and that’s the thing that keeps you from spending every day curled in the fetal position on your living room floor.

That might be enough to make it a good decision for you.

So, please, always vet your sources of financial advice and inform yourself about the personal consequences and systemic impacts of your actions.

But this isn’t a formula or a checklist. In the end, you have to decide whether a financial move feels right for you. Answering the first three questions helps you know what might happen next. Answering this last one helps you decide, finally, whether to take action.

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1. Sometimes the advice seems much simpler and less systemic: e.g. how to pay down your debt using the debt snowball method. But, as I often argue, personal finance is always political, so each of these questions is probably relevant to any financial decision, even when the risk or impact is less obvious.