itshalfempty

I have been obsessed with Caleb Hammer’s Financial Audit series on YouTube. This series has caused Caleb’s YouTube channel to explode in popularity - helping him grow from about 60,000 subscribers to over 800,000 this year. Each episode is typically about an hour long and consists of Caleb interviewing a guest about their financial situation, resulting in a plan for the interviewee to get their finances back on track.

Caleb’s advice and views on finances are solid and fairly generic. For the most part, Caleb runs numbers from the guests to compute their monthly income vs. expenses, and helps them understand just how much they are spending. Caleb generally refers to the 50-30-20 rule and building a 6-month emergency fund, though most guests have significant enough debt that he suggests they spend every non-need-dollar on debt until they are free of high-interest debts.

For folks already motivated to get their financial world under control, reading through Reddit’s /r/personalfinance wiki is probably more than sufficient. However, the vast majority of guests on Caleb’s show are not ready to take control of their finances.

With three published videos a week, Caleb talks to a lot of people. While the typical guest on the show is fairly young, it’s pretty difficult to draw more generalizations than that. Plus, as the show has grown in popularity, the guests have become significantly more diverse.

More than anything though, I find myself wondering about the systemic and cultural norms that make it easy to fall into the trap of overspending (and occasionally under-earning), and how difficult it can be to navigate back into a healthy place.