The Advice I Took Back
by Thomas · 12 July 2026 · Self-Help & Personal Growth
Thomas, author of a personal finance newsletter, realizes after years of reader feedback that mathematically optimal advice often fails because it ignores human psychology. He publicly retracts his advice to pay off the highest-interest debt first, recommending instead the psychologically more effective debt snowball method. The story illustrates that the best advice is not the smartest on paper but the one a person actually follows through.
Thomas has written a small but loyal newsletter about personal finance for low- to middle-income readers for seven years, and he remembers exactly the piece of advice he had to retract because it kept causing harm: "Pay off the debt with the highest interest rate first." Mathematically, that's correct. It's the most efficient order. But over the years Thomas got enough replies from readers to realize efficiency wasn't the actual problem.
One reader wrote that she had five small debts and one large one with high interest, and that, following his advice, she attacked the large one first — and gave up after eight months because nothing seemed to move, while the five small debts kept nagging at her like a list of unfinished accusations. Thomas started reading about behavioral economics and found the so-called "debt snowball method": pay off the smallest debt first, regardless of interest rate, then the next smallest, so you get early wins.
Mathematically, that's worse. Psychologically, he's learned, it's almost always better, because most people don't fail at a spreadsheet problem — they fail at the exhaustion of seeing no visible progress for months. He spent an entire newsletter issue publicly retracting his own earlier advice.
"The best advice isn't the one that looks smartest on paper," he's written in his signature ever since. "It's the one a person actually sees through to the end."
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