If a 20-something finfluencer makes you feel like a loser, chill, it's fine

If you open my Instagram reels, a wizened financial expert - a finfluencer - who looks part-sage, part-hotel general manager, shows up on a podcast with a Gen Z child, stating that if I'd bought Rs 1,000 of Wipro stock or something like that in 1975, I'd have hundreds of crores today. Given I didn't, with the feeble excuse that I wasn't even born, the podcast guest chides and relegates me - and people of my ilk - to the dustbin of poverty.

Hoping the next reel will be more uplifting I scroll up, only to be told by another finfluencer that because I don't have a certain HDFC Bank credit card, I have lost many valuable opportunities. Seeking solace in my loved ones and achievements till 48 is futile. Because what, indeed, is the meaning of anything if I haven't availed of bonanza cashback rewards points. Or the free airport lounge Nimbooz bottle.

In two minutes, Instagram has made me feel more inadequate financially than years of being a Bengali only-child could. And the fact that I am a loyal ICICI FD holder only makes matters worse, as the next reel tells me, 'FD investments are for dinosaurs.'

I live in India of 2024, where financial advice is given by a shouty 20-year-old (sitting under an oversized dangling mic), in under 90 secs - 'Do you know that if you just did these two simple things during the Indus Valley Era, you'd be retired today?' - to plopping sound effects and Disney chart graphics. The more I listen, the more I realise, I have failed to avail of SIPs, SWPs, ADHDs, R2D2s... So, I should just, like any loser uncle, have my investments just RIP.

The key to being a finfluencer seems to be two things:

1. Being young enough so old people (read: anyone over 35) are scared of your energy

2. Making the viewer feel bad that it's too late for them and yet not late enough to buy the products they are endorsing

As an actor friend explained to me, 'I was doing very well in my monthly SIPs, regardless of my sporadic income. But then I ordered a meat blast pizza for Rs 5,000 and stopped my SIP that month and my dream of Rs 7 cr at 60 vanished.'

The people who truly had to endure the annoyance of time to build wealth - like maintaining ancestral property for decades through family feuds, court cases, riots, floods and municipal corruption, or inheriting a stock in 1973 from a bad marriage and forgetting about it because life happened - sadly don't have the privilege to come on a hipster podcast and give wisdom on compound interest. Because at the point where they are truly wealthy, they can't walk, or see, or both.

Yes, their wealth compounded. But so did their ailments and problems. Einstein's 8th wonder of the world, as he referred to compound interest, worked for systematic investments and joint pain, both in equal measure.

Does that mean, because this column is satirising Gen Z Instagram financial advice, one should blow up their savings amid a wild midlife crisis at 45 on a Maldives holiday, a wild coffee machine, and an unaffordable Harley Davidson motorcycle? Probably not.

Nor should it mean that one should keep all their wealth in a steel trunk under the bed, afraid of the taxman, bringing back the era of the Indira Gandhi surveillance state. The answer, like everything else, is patience, research, study, and tedious analysis.

It explains why Warren Buffet, the world's cleverest investor, is a boring man who has been living in the same house his whole life. It also means Buffet is not showing up on some podcast called 'Ankit's Secret Market Tips', where Ankit shows up on a reel, 'Wait a Minute' by DJ Exe underlaid, saying 'You can make 1 crore in 9 minutes, you loser. Stop eating that meat blast pizza!'