I Found The WORST Financial Advice On TikTok

What's up guys, it's Graham here. So, over these last few months, there's been a wave of articles warning about the dangers of taking financial advice from TikTok. Because I gotta say, some of these videos are just hilariously wrong and could even land you in jail.

Like, take a look at this: if you want to make more money, get into the NFTs, real estate, crypto, stocks. Like, I'm into something called, uh, Shiba Inu coin. Also, like, just start selling—like I'm selling knives out of my basement, cutlery, kitchenware. I can plug it: if you want to get some high-quality kitchenware, go to www...

See, the thing is I love the enthusiasm, but chances are NFTs and Shiba Inus should not be a substitute for a long-term investing strategy. As far as selling knives are concerned, I'm gonna take a stab at that and guess it's probably Cutco, which many believe is an MLM. Or we have this one here, which basically summarizes: just copy rich people. Essentially, his strategy is to look at SEC Form 4 filings and then find large, frequent purchases.

The thinking is that since insiders are purchasing in the stock, they must know something that the rest of us don't. But the issue is that a lot of these trades are delayed by two to thirty days, and it's almost impossible to determine just how much their portfolio is allocated to each position. Like, you might see an insider purchasing $500,000 worth of stock and think to yourself, “Whoa, that's a lot of money! I better do some of that too,” and post about it on TikTok.

Although, if the person's worth a hundred million dollars, that's the equivalent of them buying $500 of the stock. If they're worth a hundred thousand dollars, where if it goes to zero, it's not that big of a deal. Point being, we don't know the extent of their portfolio and whether or not an investment like that is just a drop in the bucket or it's everything they possibly have.

But fine, with these excuses aside, in this example, you also have to know when to sell. And as you could see, this guy bought in at $4.10, which was pretty much the top because it currently trades for $2.40 under the ticker symbol VATE. The other dangerous strategy is just to assume that profits like this will last indefinitely.

Like, take a look at this: if you would have invested a thousand dollars, you would have turned that into $5,950 in three days. And then, if you replicated that strategy over and over again for a year, you can make $719,950. I know you're not making that money! See, this is the type of thinking that I see really often with beginner investors. They start off with a certain amount of money and then extrapolate that if they could just get one percent of that every single day, they'll be a millionaire in no time.

Which, I guess, kind of reminds me of this TikTok where it says if you double a penny for 30 days, you'll have $5.3 million in a month. Well, those any amount of experience will tell you doing that consistently is pretty much impossible. Although, if you thought that was bad, just keep watching.

All right, so here's the original transactions right there. I purchased $3,994 with the US dollars, and I also purchased Shiba Inu with three E's total. Yeah, he was buying Shiba Inu. I just think the danger with investing is that it's really, really, really easy to confuse luck with skill. Even though there might be some strategy behind the investment, as this year has shown us, it's just as easy to lose money as it is to make it.

This one serves as a great warning because, uh, it's not good. Five stops now! Now, actual expert, I'm no financial advisor, I'm not a financial coach, I'm just here to share with you what I'm buying so y'all could do your research and jump in. I kind of find it odd when people combine the phrase, “This isn't financial advice,” with “and jump in.” I feel like the two should contradict each other, but I digress. We'll continue.

All right, so number one is Lucid Group. Today's high is $25.25. Well, for those wondering, that went from $25 down to $6.50 for a loss of about 70 percent. Number two, Excel Fleet. Now, today's high is $2.80. Now, this one, unfortunately, is even worse; the company declined from $2.80 down to a low of $0.65, which is a loss of about 80 percent before then being acquired by the Shift Group.

Now, number three: I've been raving about this stock for the longest. All right, so it's called Rivian Automotive. Today's high is $46.77. I actually feel really bad for this guy because he called out Rivian at $46 a share, and since he posted the TikTok, it's down 60 percent. But at the same time, his logic seems to be, “Well, it used to trade for a hundred dollars, so now that it's trading lower than that, it's a bargain,” which to me is really no different than a retailer discounting the price of an already marked-up item to make you think you're getting a discount when they drop the price.

Plus, there's no guarantee that any stock will ever reach its previous all-time high. But, uh, then we got this one. All right, number four, Snowflake. Today's high is $241. Sadly, this one was the best performing of the list because it's only down 41. Similar to this one, number five, Roblox. Today's high is $50.08, again it's only down 45 percent, which is a bit of a win when you compare it to Lucid, Rivian, and XL Fleet.

Although, we have this last one here which he actually made some money on, and guess who won? Me! When everybody was buying Dogecoin, this stock got lit. Number six, the bonus stock—it's called Twilio. Today's high is $174.59. You can still jump in; this stock is down 70 percent from the time you made this video where you said you could still jump in.

Of course, I don't know how much he sold when it was at its peak, and in all fairness, pretty much every stock is down when you look at it year over year. I mean, even the S&P 500 is down about 20. Although, I will say speculating all in on one sector is extremely risky if you're not prepared to lose a substantial amount of money.

Okay, so everything we've seen so far only applies to investing. But what about becoming an entrepreneur? I learned about this thing called rental arbitrage through Airbnb. I said I'm living with my parents right now; what else do I have to lose? So, I decided to spend $6,800 of my $8,000 into one property, and with just that one investment, it changed my life forever.

Well, this one provides an interesting perspective. Okay, so as a realist, what he's doing is called rental arbitrage, where you could rent out a place and then you could sublease it for a profit on Airbnb. I know a few people who have done this successfully, and if you have the right structure in place, it could actually be quite profitable.

The difficulty, however, comes with the fact that Airbnb is not guaranteed, and there are a lot of cities who now want Airbnb shut down entirely if you don't live there as a full-time resident. All it takes is for one new ordinance to pass and then all of a sudden, overnight, your entire business is gone while you're still on the hook for making lease payments to the landlord.

Basically, it can be quite lucrative if you find a landlord who allows you to rent their home on a short-term basis, but you also run the risk of going deep into the red if something were to happen. Although, I gotta say my personal favorite for bad real estate advice has to go to this guy here, who's gracious enough to tell us how to make $65,000 while also showing that he is a Bentley at the exact same time.

You can go to two different banks in the same day and ask for a line of credit of ten thousand dollars. And also, you can ask your parents, friends, or Visa cards, or whatever you have to put together another ten thousand dollars. All right, so let's break this down. He recommends that you take out two loans from banks on the exact same day, which let's be real, is probably to trick the banks into giving you a loan before the information is reported to credit bureaus.

After all, if you were truly a credit-worthy customer, one bank would just give you the entire loan without having to sidestep the process. But regardless, it sounds a lot like he's suggesting you commit loan fraud, which could result in potentially your loan getting called immediately, fines, or even jail time.

Now you find a condo that is $350,000 and you only need to put five percent down payment to get the mortgage, which is $17,500. And if you're a first-time buyer, there's no property transfer tax for you, so with that money, you can own this condo.

Here's the second issue I have: buying a three hundred and fifty thousand dollar condo is never as easy as just putting five percent down and being done. You're going to be going through an extensive vetting process to have your income, credit score, and assets checked. Not to mention, you'll likely have to source the funds that you've received throughout the last 30 to 90 days. This means that you'll have to show and prove where your money came from.

And if any mortgage company sees that your down payment was borrowed from somebody else, they'll usually deny your application. Plus, you're also going to be on the hook for paying a lot of other charges like escrow fees, title fees, insurance fees, inspection costs, and a lot, lot of other things to turn that five percent into an eight percent down payment.

Now, from the $30,000 that was borrowed at the beginning minus the $17,500 down payment, you're left with twelve thousand five hundred dollars. I would use that money to do the renovation to improve the value of the property. Here's the thing: a twelve thousand five hundred dollar renovation is unlikely to go very far unless you do a lot of the work yourself.

But here's where things just get absurd. You bought the condo for three hundred fifty thousand dollars and the new appraisal comes at four hundred fifty thousand dollars. That means you have gained a hundred thousand dollars. Okay, let's be real: you're not getting a hundred thousand dollars worth of value for a twelve thousand five hundred dollar renovation.

I've done six renovations throughout my career and been involved full-time in real estate for 15 years, and I have to say generally the cost of a renovation should increase the value of a property by double or even triple of what you spent depending on what you're doing. So, in this case, a $12,500 renovation should increase the value of the property by probably about $25,000 to maybe, best case scenario, $35,000.

Under that assumption, it makes no sense to bear the cost of refinancing a property just to pull out a small amount of that profit. Most likely, any gain that you do have would just be wiped out from a bank in the fees that they charge. It's also really troubling when a commenter says banks are going to lend you money to buy a home with debt, and he responds with, “They don't need to know!” Really?

Although in terms of illegal advice, that's just the tip of the iceberg because it's a lot worse. Like, check this one out: what's a piece of information that you learned that feels illegal to know? That if you start an S Corporation and you own 100% of your S corporation, that you can buy everything that you own under that S corporation and then you don't pay taxes on anything that you purchase because it's considered a corporate expense.

Okay, let's pause right here because yes, it is true that corporations only pay tax on what's left over after expenses. So, if you make $100,000 but you spend $40,000, you're taxed on the remainder of $60,000. But that only works if you have an actual business. You can't just work a normal nine-to-five job, start an S Corporation, and then begin deducting your personal expenses to lower your taxes.

Otherwise, that's considered tax evasion, with a maximum sentence of five years. The worst of it, though, has to go to the cryptocurrency TikTok accounts because at best they're built on the premise of “trust me” with absolutely no research to back up their claims whatsoever.

But take a look at this one, which somehow garnered over 80,000 likes. [Music] But once you begin to take a look through the profile, you'll begin to see that the TikToks that do best promise a quick retirement, 1,000x returns, and easy money, which I think is just a symptom of an even bigger problem: people want a lot of money for doing absolutely nothing.

Although, I gotta say, at the end of the day, a lot of these videos are well-intentioned, unless they want to flex cash called millionaires poor, LOL, and complain about having too much money. But the truth is, beyond the bare bones explanations, building wealth, investing, and starting a business are way less exciting than you would think.

Like, the safest invest typically revolve around total stock market index funds, which generally return about seven percent a year. Now, real estate could certainly be fantastic, but it requires a lot of work; it's a high barrier to entry, and it helps to have a very stable income. A business could also be fantastic to work on, but it's 24/7, it's extremely inconsistent, and it's almost impossible to get it to the level where you could travel the world and work from a beach. Plus, getting sand in your computer is never fun.

Now, through all of this, though, after watching TikToks for years, I have to say it is getting better and it seems to be moving in the right direction for just getting people to think about different options. But just realize that anything you do is going to take a lot of work. The more money you make, the more risk you take, and no matter what, it also helps to hit the like button and subscribe if you haven't done that already.

So, with that said, you guys, thank you so much for watching. As always, feel free to add me on Instagram, and don't forget that our sponsor, public.com, has a free stock for you worth all the way up to a thousand dollars when you sign up using the link in the description with the code "gram," and make a deposit. Let me know which stock you get. Enjoy! Thank you so much for watching, and until next time.