I Will Teach You to Be Rich

Reviewed by Diario de un Inversor · UpdatedJune 13, 2026

Our review

«I Will Teach You to Be Rich» is the most action-oriented personal finance manual published in the millennial Anglo-American financial culture: Ramit Sethi, a California-based entrepreneur and writer, published the first edition in 2009 and substantially updated it in 2019. The book proposes a six-week plan to automate personal finances without requiring daily discipline or detailed budgeting. Sethi's thesis is that most people do not have an information problem — they know they should save — but a friction problem: the banking and financial system is designed to make the right thing hard and the costly thing easy. His solution is decision architecture: open the right accounts (no-fee checking, high-yield savings, no-foreign-transaction-fee credit card), connect them with automatic transfers, and set up automatic investment in low-cost index funds. What distinguishes Sethi from other authors in the genre is his explicit position on spending: he does not propose austerity as a virtue but advocates identifying the spending categories that generate real satisfaction and optimizing everything else. His main limitation is that the book is written for the US market, and the accounts, funds, and platforms he mentions do not exist in Spain or Latin America, so Spanish-speaking readers must adapt the principles to their own context.

Key takeaways

• Automating saving and investing before money reaches the current account eliminates the need for daily discipline.
• The right financial accounts and products — no fees, earning interest — generate significant long-term differences without additional effort.
• The goal of budgeting is not total restriction but identifying where spending generates real value and reducing the rest guilt-free.
• Starting to invest in low-cost index funds in one's twenties or thirties has a disproportionate impact on wealth at sixty.

Fact

«I Will Teach You to Be Rich» was first published in 2009 and substantially updated in 2019; Ramit Sethi began developing the book's content on his personal blog in 2004 while a student at Stanford.