Pod Insights Money Guy Show Financial Advisors React - Top 10 INSANE Money Advice Videos About this episode Brian and Bo react to 10 outrageous personal finance videos circulating online, debunking misleading claims about 401(k) loans, day trading, real estate schemes, whole life insurance, and side hustles. Stay tuned through the end to watch as we count down to the craziest video we found.. The episode serves as a reminder to be wary of social media “gurus” and to focus on proven wealth-building principles.
Jump start your journey with our FREE financial resources
Reach your goals faster with our products
Take the relationship to the next level: become a client
Subscribe on YouTube for early access and go beyond the podcast
Connect with us on social media for more content
Bring confidence to your wealth building with simplified strategies from The Money Guy. Learn how to apply financial tactics that go beyond common sense and help you reach your money goals faster. Make your assets do the heavy lifting so you can quit worrying and start living a more fulfilled life.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Transcript 5,197 words · 15 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Speaker 00 Your sausage McMuffin with egg didn't change, your receipt did. The sausage McMuffin with egg extra value meal includes a hash brown and a small coffee for just $5. Only at McDonald's for a limited time.
0:12 Speaker 01 Pricing participation may vary. Promotion pricing may be lower than meal pricing.
0:16 Speaker 02 This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome, that's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required. Compatibility and availability varies 18 plus.
0:41 Speaker 03 Don't tell them that it's gonna be a rental. Complete fraud. Oh, wait a minute.
0:45 Speaker 04 Because I pay for things, what offers? Everything costs the same amount.
0:49 Brian Preston? How does Grant say this when he owns all this real estate?
0:54 Brian Preston? Welcome back, Money Guy family. The team has once again put together what they tell us are 10 insane videos.
1:02 Speaker 06 And Brent, I am so excited about this because it sounds like these are truly unhinged. And they said to make sure that we pay special attention to the very last one. So let's dive right in.
1:15 Speaker 07 I'm gonna say this and I might get a lot of criticism for it, but I will. Take that loan from your 401k. Take that loan from your 401k. Holy if. I've been fighting for your life to get a little breathing room for your finances. You've been budgeting, you've been cutting back on expenses, you've been trying to save, you've been trying to do everything, you've been trying to do right by your money, but nothing is working out for you. You just can't catch a break. Number one, that's your money. The employer may match up to a certain percentage, but some of that money that you earned and worked hard for is being contributed to that as well. Number two, the interest rates on the loan is usually lower than a bank loan or anywhere that you can get from a financial institution. Number three, only use it for like an immediate fund. You're trying to build up your savings, you're trying to pay off debt, or you're trying to, you know, use it towards a down payment on a home or something. Do not, and I repeat, do not go and use this for no BS.
1:58 Speaker 07 This is not for no clothing, this is not for none of that, not even for a vacation. And lastly, if you're gonna use it to pay off debt, please, and I'm really hesitant even sharing this because I don't want anybody to take this and say, oh, I did this, but you're not responsible with it. If you're gonna use it to pay off debt, do not go and get the debt that was freed up from you paying it off with the 401k loan and run that debt back up because now you just right back in debt with the credit card specifically and then you still gotta pay back this loan. It's just like a, a, a balance transfer which I ain't gonna get too deep into that. Matter of fact, I'll make a separate video about it. But again, like I said, I was hesitant making this video, but it can really help some people if used responsibly, if used intentionally and you have a plan for the money.
2:43 Speaker 07 So please, only use this if you're gonna be responsible and it'll really benefit you. Do not use this to enhance or increase your consumerism.
2:51 Speaker 06 He went both directions here. He started off really, really bad because he's basically saying, hey, that 401k is there. You need to go rob from your future self, rob from your future self, rob from your future self. But then he did kinda bring it back and he said, if you do find yourself in the situation where you must take a 401k loan, don't do it for this and don't do it for this and don't do it for this. So I'm conflicted. Some of the advice he gave there was okay. I just, ah, I don't like the way that it started.
3:13 Brian Preston? Here's the thing, you dig a hole. What I want you to know, when you're young, you are a billionaire of time. And when you're a billionaire of time, your time just can grow exponentially. So you get to choose your heart. If you are young, you only have to use a little bit of discipline in your savings because your money's just gonna grow upon itself so much that it's going, your life is going to be great and that discipline's gonna be rewarded. If you dig the hole like he's talking, because everything he was talking about there, a lot of it was consumption decisions, bad decisions with spending more, lifestyle and so forth. If you take a loan and you also have these consumption habits, you're never, ever going to get out of the hole. And that's just the reality of the situation. And that's why it made my stomach hurt watching that video
3:59 Brian Preston? because I didn't see a way out. And that's why I tried to tell you, just take a little bit of today and you can build your great, big, beautiful tomorrow.
4:07 Speaker 08 You have to trade at the right times because if you don't, you can actually lose a lot of money. If you look at all the profitable traders, they are trading at a certain time. And the best time to trade is actually when your session opens. You trade in Forex, you have your session opens. If you're trading stocks, you know it opens at 9:30 a.m., right? If you're trading indices or NASDAQ or futures, you know that certain instruments open at a certain time. That's when you need to trade because that's when all the volume comes in. That's when all the volatility comes in and actually give you decent moves so you can make profits. You can't just open up your laptop and say, "Oh, you know what? It's 5 o'clock P.M. Let me take a trade." It's probably underperforming. Because it might be slow that time. Take, trade when the market has volume.
4:50 Speaker 06 If I knew where a hidden treasure was buried and I did a YouTube video and I said, "Hey, here's how to find the hidden treasure, here's how to find..." Do you know what immediately happened? Everybody would go get the hidden treasure, the hidden treasure would not be there. So him saying, "Hey, if you're going to day trade, the best time to trade is just when the market opens, the very beginning." And everyone's just going to trade when the market opens at the very beginning. If it were that easy, then everybody would do it. That doesn't even pass any semblance of common sense that just picking what time of day you trade is going to dictate whether or not you have some sort of profitable trading strategy.
5:17 Brian Preston? Whenever I meet people and they find out what I do for a living, they immediately want to talk about stock tips, trading, and then I think I break their heart. Because I tell them, "You want to know what I do with my money? I buy index funds." All of this, and what's funny is I've had neighbors who are telling me the latest and greatest. I can name off all the different stocks. And then they come to me, usually three, four years in the future, and they go, "You know what? I actually started paying attention. And that S&P 500 fund that you've been talking about seems to outperform." And meanwhile, I'm wasting hours, my tax preparation fees are higher. I feel like I'm just upset because my portfolio is bad this day or I'm to the moon on days that it's up. That's just so much hassle factor. Instead of timing the market, I think you ought to focus on time in the market.
6:03 Speaker 09 Here's how you get ahead of everybody in your high school. Go get a side job, use that money to build a side hustle. Get $500 saved. Now you can go to Nike and Adidas and buy sneakers at discount rates and then flip them for a profit on eBay, Amazon and Facebook Marketplace. Like and follow for more money-making tips.
6:22 Brian Preston? I do like the hustle factor. I knew guys who cut grass in high school and actually made like adult money in high school. So you can go side hustle and make good money. Look, I don't get the whole, I'm not a sneaker head. I know people struggle with boats too, because you know, the best two days on boats is the day you buy it and the day you sell it. But we knew somebody who actually made money because they knew the market so well in boats that they could buy and sell and turn a profit. But that is so obscure that I just, I think there's too many transaction costs. Because if you buy these sneakers, there's going to be a cost to list, to sell, to, I just, I don't know if that's why.
7:00 Speaker 06 There's going to be a cost to list, a cost to sell, a cost to just hold them. Here's what I'd rather you do, if you're gonna go get that side job and you're gonna go make $500, don't go buy a pair of Nike shoes, go buy some shares of Nike. Go buy the company itself, or better yet, just buy the S and P 500 index and let your money do that way. So rather than you have to create this private exchange where you're buying a product and trying to sell a product for upcharge, why don't you go to the original source? That's what's beautiful about publicly traded markets, is you can actually be an owner in these companies. So if you're doing the hard work of creating a side income, doing the side gig, it is much easier to put your money to work than having to go figure out how to go create a separate business on top of the business that you've already created.
7:40 Brian Preston? Bo, I have a question. How many clients have come to us, it's prospects, that made all their money in sneakers?
7:46 Speaker 06 We have zero sneaker millionaires right now.
8:05 Brian Preston? Do you realize what a shot in the dark, each one of those is, I mean, it's like playing the lottery. I mean, every one of those things was some speculative play. And also even like YouTube, it is not easy to get, make a lot of money on YouTube. And this is, we're content creators, we have larger platforms. It's work. So I don't, I mean, it cracks me up that so many people aspire to it. And they don't, I don't think they realize the commitment you're actually signing up for. Cause there's a lot of quit that happens before you actually reach success.
8:37 Speaker 06 This video could have said, hey, here's one of the ways, if you want to go be rich in 20, that's a 2023, just go be a professional athlete. Oh, okay. Well, that makes tons of sense in the world. Well, I may not have the skill set or the ability or the wherewithal to be a professional athlete. That's the same way. If you want to be some sort of social media marketer, or you want to be some sort of YouTube person, or you want to get into Forex trading, there's not a high level of success in any of those markets. There are levels of success, but to think that you're just going to start out and go do that in one year, be rich and successful. I think it takes a little bit more work, a little more effort than that.
9:08 Brian Preston? That is the fine print wealth, meaning that there, yes, there are people that have made money in every one of those things, but it ain't going to be you because it is the just smallest of small fractions. If you want to know how real wealth happens, it's the index funds, it's buying the markets, it's putting hard work to work. So your army of dollar bills can work harder than you can with your back, your brain, and even your hands. Said a home is a terrible investment.
9:33 Speaker 10 It is a terrible investment. Doesn't cash flow. You don't get big tax write offs because of it. You have no leverage. You're living in it. You're paying for it. You never own it. Even when the loan's paid, you don't own it.
9:43 Brian Preston? Really?
9:44 Speaker 10 No, you still gotta pay property taxes. Still gotta insure, still gotta maintain it. If you just break it down and don't become emotional.
9:50 Brian Preston? Now, how does Grant say this when he owns all this real estate?
9:53 Speaker 10 Your house, you're a partner in this house with the state.
9:56 Brian Preston? Your recommendation to a normal family would be to rent?
9:58 Speaker 10 Never buy a house. Rent where you live. Take all your money and invest in properties that cash flow. I'm not saying don't own real estate. I'm saying live in a house and pay rent. Take all the money that you would have spent on that house and invest in real estate that cash flows that pays you every month. Could be retail, storage. Apartment buildings like we invest in could be land if you're a farmer or rancher and you know how to get cows to cash flow then do that.
10:20 Brian Preston? Here's the question, does Grant rent his houses?
10:23 Speaker 06 Well, honestly, I don't know the answer to that question. There's a good chance for Grant may say, oh, yeah, I do.
10:26 Brian Preston? No, I see if you, all you have to do is go on YouTube and you see he has beach property. He has all this other stuff because he's made YouTube videos with it all in the background. And I can't imagine, maybe he is, maybe this is MTV Cribs edition, but.
10:38 Speaker 06 I disagree with about 112% of what Grant says all the time. However, he did have some glimmers and they said, hey, you can invest in rental property. You can invest in cash flow businesses. You can invest in assets that will have a real return for you. That's, that's true. Those are all true and factual and actual things. That is different than, hey, if you want to live somewhere and you know, you're going to be there for five to seven years and you want to be able to set roots and you want to be able to own it, or as he says, be in partnership where all you got to pay is property taxes once the mortgage is paid off. There's nothing wrong with that. And a lot of millionaires do that. If you actually look at the recent studies, most Americans, the majority of their wealth is locked up inside the equity, inside the home that they own. So owning a home can be a wonderful way to build wealth over the long term.
11:22 Speaker 06 Certainly not an absolutely necessary way, but suggesting that everybody should rent because trying to own a home is a terrible investment. Your primary home is not supposed to be an investment. It's supposed to be a use asset. It's supposed to be sheltered. It's supposed to be where you raise your family. That is different from money you are deploying to go work hard for you for the future.
11:39 Brian Preston? Well, how about wealth is beyond the money? How much fun is made by having neighbors that you become best friends with, that you raise your kids with? There's a lot more to life than just what's on your net worth statement. There's something to be learned by that.
11:53 Speaker 00 Your sausage McMuffin with egg didn't change, your receipt did. The sausage McMuffin with egg extra value meal includes a hash brown and a small coffee for just $5. Only at McDonald's for a limited time.
12:05 Speaker 01 Price and participation may vary. Promotion pricing may be lower than meal pricing.
12:09 Speaker 02 This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome, that's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web. Like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required. Compatibility and availability varies 18 plus.
12:34 Speaker 03 It's one Airbnb to retire. So I pay $700 a night for this Airbnb. As you can see, this is just an average setup. It's not anything fancy, but it's the location. If you take 700 times 30 days, that's $21,000 a month. This house probably goes from $750,000. So when you go get a loan with a bank to buy a second home, don't tell them that it's going to be a rental.
12:58 Brian Preston? Complete fraud.
12:59 Speaker 03 Because it's a rental, you have to put 20 to 25% down. So what you do is you tell them that this is your secondary vacation house. So you only require to put 10% down. The average income in America is around $54,000 a year. And just by renting this house out for three months out of the year, you make $63,000.
13:20 Speaker 06 That's if you rent it every single day for 90 days consecutively. You would do that. And he just encouraged you to commit fraud and likely get arrested. That was the advice that he suggested.
13:30 Brian Preston? I've often wondered, you see content creators all the time, post on social media that I just did this and I made $10,000 in 10 days. And then what they want you to do is they want you to do exactly what he does. Extrapolate that 10 days income and assume they do that every 10 days. And they make a gazillion dollars a year. That's not the reality. I can promise you that Airbnb is not rented 365 days. I had a beach condo, my own. Learn from my mistakes. You only make your money in those peak seasons. The rest of the time, you're just praying that you can get a snowbird to live there and pay your notes or your mortgage payment. This is why these people mislead you. They act like every day, the best days are every days,
14:13 Brian Preston? when that's just not how this process works.
14:16 Speaker 06 When you go to borrow money, when you sign any sort of loan documents, there's going to be a thing at the very bottom, at the very end, before you sign this says, "I attest that all information shared in this document is truthful and accurate to the best of my knowledge." If you are doing something and that is not true, and you are signing saying that it is, there's a good chance you end up in a world of hurt. Don't do that.
14:35 Brian Preston? You could end up in jail. Yep.
14:37 Speaker 11 About to buy a million dollar home for half the price. The thing is, you can only do this if you know how to utilize cryptocurrency. So this is the house that I'm gonna buy, and it costs about 1.4 million. So I'll have to pay around 7 grand a month. But for this entire house, the total that I need to pay is 740K. It's because of crypto. For the down payment, I'll have to pay about 20%, which is 290K. With the remaining 450K, I'm gonna put that into the Anchor protocol. Once I deposit the 450K, it'll yield me 19% per year.
15:07 Brian Preston? Guaranteed.
15:08 Speaker 11 8 grand a year. Now divide that by 12 months, and that's gonna make me 7.3K a month. Just enough to cover the monthly cost of this mansion. After it's paid off, I'll have a 1.4 million dollar home, plus be making 7.3K a month doing nothing. If you wanna learn more about crypto, check out my bio.
15:23 Brian Preston? Hey, somebody go check on the status of this guy, because I think a lot of these protocols have busted.
15:28 Speaker 06 That, there's no way. Well, I've seen that video before. I wanna know where this guy is right now. That's not the way that the real world works. That's not the way that you actually go out and build wealth. That's just not possible. That's not something that could actually happen. Oh, I'm gonna go do this. I'm gonna make 15% every month, and da-da-da-da-da. That's not the way that wealth is created. That's not the way investment returns work. If you happen to see somebody telling you that's what happens, or you happen to be in something where all of a sudden I'm getting double-digit monthly returns every single month, I would caution you. Be very careful. It's likely you're involved in something that you do not wanna be involved in, that does not stand up. That's likely a scheme.
16:02 Brian Preston? Trees don't grow to heaven.
16:04 Speaker 11 When I go to a house party, I always ask the host, "How many bedrooms are in your house, though?" They're like, "Uh, I don't know, 4 bedrooms?" Okay.
16:10 Brian Preston? Why are you asking me that?
16:11 Speaker 11 4 bedrooms. Legally, you are required by state law to have 9 smoke detectors in that house. That's 9 smoke detectors I can steal batteries from. Yeah.
16:20 Brian Preston? Oh, this is tongue-to-cheek.
16:22 Speaker 11 I'm upstairs profiting. I'm looting your house. I'm unscrewing Philips light bulbs, the LED light bulbs. The really nice ones you can control with your phone. I can unscrew those, and now they're in my pocket. Now they're in my backpack. Now I'm walking out the door. Now I've got 60 dollars.
16:33 Brian Preston? Wait till he finds out about catalytic converters.
16:35 Speaker 11 To make on Facebook Marketplace when I resell them. I've positioned myself to be in a place to succeed, and I won't go to house parties that are less than 3 bedrooms.
16:44 Brian Preston? Might as well take the air conditioner and get the copper out, too.
16:47 Speaker 06 Could you imagine a dude walking out of a party with just light bulbs just sticking out of his pockets everywhere? That's not, that's not a thing.
16:54 Brian Preston? They put that one in there to see if we were awake still.
16:56 Speaker 06 And look, if you go to a house party and you steal all the batteries of the smoke detectors and then you unscrew all the light bulbs and steal all those.
17:02 Brian Preston? You're only getting invited to that party once.
17:03 Speaker 06 I assure you that will be the last house party you get to go to because all of a sudden you're going to be called Sticky Finger Steve and you don't get to go to house parties anymore.
17:10 Brian Preston? That's an important lesson to teach your kids. You gotta be careful how you behave because you don't want to get one of these bad nicknames and then get labeled and carry that for the rest of your life.
17:18 Speaker 04 Because I pay for things with offers, everything costs the same amount. It doesn't matter if it's this watch or this phone or a brand new car or a private jet, it all costs the same amount. Now, I know that sounds crazy. I'm going to look at something I'd like to buy and it's outside my current spending comfort zone.
17:37 Speaker 06 A car.
17:38 Speaker 04 A car. I'm going to buy a hundred thousand dollar car. So I can look at that car and if I make a hundred thousand dollars a year, I ask the question, is this worth a year of my life? You know what I'm going to do? I'm going to create an offer. I'm going to create a five thousand dollar offer and this five thousand dollar offer is going to create a transformation for somebody that's worth fifty thousand dollars to them. So they're going to pay me five thousand dollars. So when I create the offer, I have to use creativity to create the offer. I have, I gave them the offer, they paid me for it, but I still have the offer. They bought it, but I still have it, which means I can sell it to somebody else. So this one person that gave me five thousand dollars, that doesn't preclude me from selling that same five thousand dollar offer to another person or another 10 people or another 100 people or another thousand people. So I still have the offer, I still have the creativity that I used to create the offer and I have the money. Now I take the money and I go buy the car, I don't have the money anymore, but I have
18:22 Speaker 04 the car, the creativity and the offer. Which means I can go sell the offer again and replace the money that I no longer had because I spent it on the car.
18:29 Speaker 06 You ever seen the movie Inception where it's like a dream within a dream within a dream? I feel like that's what just happened. I didn't.
18:35 Brian Preston? He was well spoken, but I couldn't tell where he was going with it. That's what, you always had to be careful of the silver tongue people that make everything sound good, but I just was like, I'm lost in the woods.
18:45 Speaker 06 He said, I'm going to come up with an offer and that offer is going to be five thousand.
18:50 Brian Preston? But somehow he's selling the offer and then he was buying the car. It made me think of, you know, if you're old my age, chain letters where you send out supposedly and convince people to send you a dollar back and you supposedly be rich.
19:02 Speaker 06 If you go to a car dealership and you try to buy a hundred thousand dollar car and you tell them, I have a single five thousand dollar offer for you.
19:10 Speaker 06 That I can give you that you can sell over and over again, they are not going to let you drive off. The odds are you may be leaving that dealership in the back of someone else's car.
19:19 Speaker 12 It's whole life insurance, and this is probably the most underrated underrated, undervalued investment of all time. And I think I believe in all my heart, it's kept this way because they don't want it to become some public thing.
19:34 Brian Preston? Oh.
19:34 Speaker 12 Chase Bank owns the most whole life insurance of any bank, 500 billion or something like that, right? And all these millionaires and billionaires and private equity funds, all they're doing is taking this money that they're making from their businesses when they, you know, go and buy a business small and build it up and sell it. They take that money and stick it in your real estate and then or stick it in whole life insurance.
19:55 Brian Preston? Oh, or whole life.
19:56 Speaker 12 When it's a whole life insurance, you can leverage it again.
20:00 Speaker 06 Okay. So what do you say there at the end? Wow. All these millionaires and billionaires, Brian, we know a bunch of millionaires. They all take all this money they're getting from their businesses and they dump it in real estate. Yeah, true. So that happens and they dump it into whole life. Ah, not so much. And then what they do is, and he did this thing, he goes.
20:15 Speaker 13 Then they leverage it. Oh, I don't think I'm a lot dumber than you thought that I think that I thought I was once.
20:20 Speaker 06 Then they can borrow. Yes, that is true. If you have a cash value, whole life, permanent type insurance policy, you can borrow against that. But my question is, why on earth, if you're a business owner who's making all this money and has all this money, why would you go buy a thing, an insurance product that then you have to borrow money from in order to access the capital? It does not make sense. This is not, in fact, what wealthy people do with their money.
20:44 Brian Preston? Yeah, without a doubt. Look, insurance has a place in your wealth building journey for de-risking, protecting you in case you prematurely die or have accidents or things like that. And it is true, wealthy people can use life insurance and other things for planning methods. But I believe what he's describing, I think he's just setting up a honey trap to try to get seven figure people in to be, because look, people hate paying taxes. So they hear somebody who's once again, silver tongued, goes in, it wouldn't surprise me if we find out later that this is, this is not on the up and up. Holy cow. You guys were not kidding. This was true insanity. And it just shows me be careful who you let
21:27 Brian Preston? in your head, because there's a lot of people trying to get into your wallet, into your purse. You've got to pay attention and know that there's a better way to do money.
21:35 Speaker 06 If it sounds too good to be true, it often is. The things that have worked for the last 100 years when it comes to building wealth are likely the things that are going to work for the next 100 years. Be careful of folks who are trying to sell you something that is not real.
21:48 Brian Preston? Hey, like our feedback? Go to moneyguy.com, check it out for yourself. I'm Brian, this is Bo, Money Guy team, out.
21:56 Speaker 06 The Money Guy Show is hosted by Brian Preston and Bo Hanson. Brian and Bo are partners with Abound Wealth Management. Abound Wealth Management is a registered investment advisory firm regulated by the Securities and Exchange Commission in accordance and compliance with the securities laws and regulations. Abound Wealth Management does not render or offer to render personalized investment or tax advice through the Money Guy Show. The information provided is for informational purposes only, may not be suitable for all investors, and does not constitute financial, tax, investment, or legal advice. All investments involve a degree of risk, including the risk of loss.
22:29 Speaker 00 Your sausage McMuffin with egg didn't change, your receipt did. The sausage McMuffin with egg extra value meal includes a hash brown and a small coffee for just $5, only at McDonald's for a limited time.
22:41 Speaker 01 Price and participation may vary. Promotion pricing may be lower than meal pricing.
22:45 Speaker 14 What's the secret to being a great host this season? Keeping things deliciously simple, like mixing Simply Cranberry into a festive drink as guests arrive, or serving up a warm mug of Simply Apple on a chilly night. That means less time behind the scenes and more time in the moment with everyone. Crafted with real fruit, Simply juices and fruit drinks make any holiday drink effortless, inviting, and completely delicious. Simply, say yes to simple.
Previous How to Make Money in a Market Crash Next Is a $100k Income STILL Enough to Buy the American Dream? | Making a Millionaire Page updated November 3, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated