Financial Advice From Bethenny Frankel

Real Housewife, talk show host, diet industry entrepreneur, self-help author, former Apprentice contestant, and novelist — yes, novelist — Bethenny Frankel knows how to make money. (HollywoodTake estimates her net worth at $25 million.)

She’s also a contributor to the blog The Haute Mess, and I was excited to read her newest post: “Pro Tips for Managing Your Money.” What wisdom could she share with us? Maybe she’d teach us how to repackage general diet advice into a series of bestsellers, or maybe she’d tell us to let Bravo film our weddings. Maybe she’d follow Jessica Simpson’s example and admit the best way to manage money is to hire someone else to do it for you.

Or maybe she’d tell us to make a budget and avoid using credit cards:

A budget doesn’t have to be annoying or complicated. It’s just a very basic list of how much you bring in each month, what you absolutely have to pay, and what expenses are discretionary, like shopping or even food (you need food, but how much you spend on it can vary greatly).

[…]

Pay down your cards by making the largest payments you can, even before you save, because credit is costing you a lot more than you will earn in interest in any savings account. Make this priority, and wise up.

Wise up, everybody! The only reason we dum-dums aren’t at Bethenny Frankel’s professional financial level is because we haven’t figured out that we have to pay off those stinky credit cards.

The kicker? The little text at the bottom of her post that states “Pro Tips for Managing Your Money” is an excerpt from Frankel’s 2013 book Skinnygirl Solutions. Pro tip for managing your money? Recycle your content so you can get paid twice.

I don’t mean to pick on Bethenny Frankel in particular, but it’s so disingenuous for someone like her to tell the rest of us that finances are all about budgeting and debt maintenance. It would be much more interesting if she talked about her own finances, and shared what she had learned while managing her actual money.

But hey, making budgets and paying off debt will always be popular, because that’s what a lot of us will be doing for the rest of our lives.

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