How to Tell If a Personal Finance Website is Bull$#! ^

I got an email last week asking me if I’d like to link out to a personal finance website. Their pitch was that they had useful content for my audience and they wanted to help share it. Ok cool, sounds good. That’s a pretty standard pitch and before I link out to any sites I always check them out to make sure their legit.

When I went on their website I saw the standard personal finance articles like “9 ways to contribute more to your 401k” and “14 tips to budget better”. *Yawn*. Either way, all standard stuff.

Then I saw something that tripped my bullshit alarm. The author of this site had written an income report detailing how they had made $8,500 last month. That’s fine, perfectly normal and definitely impressive.

But right below the article, the author had a couple of links to some services that they said they used to make money. The list of services included being a secret shopper and taking surveys.

If you’ve ever looked into survey taking as a side hustle, you’ll know it’s a complete joke. You’ll be spending hours taking surveys (which are mind numbing) in exchange for a couple of dollars. In 99% of the cases you’ll end up making less than minimum wage, all while filling someone else’s pocket books.

Sure enough, the author of this blog attributed a large chunk (over $1,000) of their monthly earnings to affiliate commissions they earned from getting their readers to sign up for the survey website.

Shockingly enough, the author themselves actually made $0 from taking surveys! It’s all from getting people to sign up and taking a cut of their work.

If you’re looking to build a side hustle, you want something you control. An asset you can build, that will produce cash flow, and that you can sell at a later date for a multiple of the cash flow.

Taking surveys is not an asset. It’s a less than minimum wage job that will lead no where and will never make you a significant amount of money.

Key Takeaway

The next time you're on a personal finance site and you see the author celebrating their $10k or $50k earnings from that month, ask yourself where it comes from.

Is this person walking the walk? Or just talking the talk and shilling out for affiliate commissions so they can profit off of their readers hard work.

If you’d like to learn how to make real money and build real assets, sign up for my mailing list below and follow along with my side hustles as I document step by step how I do it.