Reddit and Finance: What the Site Can Teach You About Money

Are you on Reddit? If not, you may be surprised to discover that it has an active personal financial section. If you become a member, you can post questions there, and you’ll often get 20 or more responses. You can also just peruse the Reddit and finance section and find topics where you can expand your personal finance knowledge.

What Reddit Can Teach You About Finance

The better question is, what can’t Reddit teach you about finance? This site is a wealth of financial information. (Excuse the pun!)

Interactions on Reddit Finance

There are currently over 14 million members in the Reddit personal finance section. This group is extremely active and polite. I know finding kindness on the Web can sometimes feel as rare as spotting a unicorn, but the people in the Reddit personal finance section generally seem to want to help one another and share information.

What Is Discussed?

Everything and anything! You will find a wide range of topics. For instance, recently an 18-year-old asked for finance advise as she prepares to move out—how much to budget for rent and utilities, where to buy the cheapest, quality furniture, etc.

Reddit and Finance — Photo by Jonny Rothwell on Unsplash

In the subreddits, a man is selling his house, but the house requires a new roof at the tune of $18k. Should he replace the roof before putting the house on the market? The advice he received was very good, including the best idea—put on the new roof, and then list the house for $20k more than he was planning to list it for.

Peruse the site, and you’ll find suggestions for everything from personal finance books to read to real estate speculation. You’ll find people giving advice about how to prepare financially to die. Sure, the topic sounds morbid, but the person writing just had a parent die and then came to Reddit to suggest all of the things the parent could have done to make it easier on the grown child settling the parent’s affairs. That’s advice we could all use.

Subreddits

Under the Reddit Personal Finance category, there are many subreddits (subcategories) including:

Almost Homeless (31k members)
Career Guidance (265k members)
Eat Cheap and Healthy (2.9 million members)
Entrepreneur (907k members)
Financial Independence (865k members)
Meal Prep Sunday (2 million members)
Military Finance (18k members)
Relationships (3 million members)
Student Loans (100k members)
What Car Should I Buy? (110k members)
Credit Cards (306k members)
Frugal (1.7 million members)
Investing (1.7 million members)
Jobs (51k members)
Legal Advice (1.5 million members)
PF Jerk (21k members)
PF Tools (7k members)
Real Estate (243k members)
Tax (116k members)

In addition to these subreddits, you can also filter your interest further.

If you don’t live in the United States, you can choose regional Reddit upvotes by country.

Or, you can filter by flair, which is a bit like filtering by tags on a blog.

Having so many subreddit options makes it possible for you to post a question and make sure the right people answer. It can also make for entertaining reading, especially for some of the subreddits like relationships and PF Jerks.

Final Thoughts

You may never have connected Reddit and finance, but surprisingly, the site can teach you a great deal about personal finance. In addition, the site can also serve as a springboard to more standard personal finance information found in books and other resources.

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Melissa Batai

Melissa is a freelance writer and virtual assistant. She earned her Master’s from Southern Illinois University, and her Bachelor’s in English from the University of Michigan. When she’s not working, you can find her homeschooling her kids, reading a good book, or cooking.