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Fixed: Why Personal Finance Is Broken and How to Make It Work for Everyone
Two leading economists reveal why today’s personal finance markets are rigged against us and offer practical steps to fix them
We interact with the financial system every day, whether taking out or paying off loans, making insurance claims, or simply depositing money into our bank accounts. Fixed exposes how this system has been corrupted to serve the interests of financial services providers and their cleverest customers—at the expense of ordinary people.
John Campbell and Tarun Ramadorai diagnose the ills of today’s personal finance markets in the United States and across the globe, looking at everything from short-term saving and borrowing to loans for education and housing, financial products for retirement, and insurance. They show how the system is “fixed” to benefit those who are wealthy and more educated while encouraging financial mistakes by those who are aren’t, making it difficult for regular consumers to make sound financial decisions and disadvantaging them in some of the most consequential economic transactions of their lives. Campbell and Ramadorai describe how some even opt out of the financial system altogether, relying on unregulated and often shady mechanisms to implement necessary financial functions, with dire consequences for individuals, families, and the economy more broadly.
With the explosive growth of the global middle class, longer lifespans, and greater numbers of seniors managing their money alone, the pitfalls of personal finance now affect billions of people around the world. Fixed proposes concrete solutions that harnesses the expertise of economists, the power of government, and the speed of technology to restore fairness and trust in our broken system and make it work better for ordinary people.
We interact with the financial system every day, whether taking out or paying off loans, making insurance claims, or simply depositing money into our bank accounts. Fixed exposes how this system has been corrupted to serve the interests of financial services providers and their cleverest customers—at the expense of ordinary people.
John Campbell and Tarun Ramadorai diagnose the ills of today’s personal finance markets in the United States and across the globe, looking at everything from short-term saving and borrowing to loans for education and housing, financial products for retirement, and insurance. They show how the system is “fixed” to benefit those who are wealthy and more educated while encouraging financial mistakes by those who are aren’t, making it difficult for regular consumers to make sound financial decisions and disadvantaging them in some of the most consequential economic transactions of their lives. Campbell and Ramadorai describe how some even opt out of the financial system altogether, relying on unregulated and often shady mechanisms to implement necessary financial functions, with dire consequences for individuals, families, and the economy more broadly.
With the explosive growth of the global middle class, longer lifespans, and greater numbers of seniors managing their money alone, the pitfalls of personal finance now affect billions of people around the world. Fixed proposes concrete solutions that harnesses the expertise of economists, the power of government, and the speed of technology to restore fairness and trust in our broken system and make it work better for ordinary people.
352 pages, Hardcover
Published October 21, 2025
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
October 26, 2025
Fixed is a terrific book about how badly broken personal finance is—and what should be done about it. I particularly appreciated the unique (to my knowledge) way in which this book is deeply grounded in international scholarship, drawing especially on the U.S., U.K., and India. It shows striking commonalities in both the experiences of ordinary people and the failures of policy systems to police the personal finance industry. While it includes a good deal of personal finance advice, it is mostly an argument against the idea that we can rely on financial education—or even nudges—to fix the problem. Instead, it advocates more active regulation along the lines of what the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) was set up to do in the United States.
The book begins by documenting the extent of financial illiteracy. (I was shocked that one question people often got wrong was: if you earn 2% interest on $100 over five years, how much do you end up with? The correct answer was “More than $102”—it didn’t even require understanding compounding.) It also explains some of the sources of this illiteracy, including behavioral biases in thinking about the future; the lack of reinforcement learning when financial decisions have consequences decades later; and the social fact that people talk about personal finance even less than sex (the authors’ observation, not mine!). Companies, of course, don’t suffer from these issues, and their complex, opaque products—with bundling, hidden fees, and other traps—are often designed to exploit them.
John Campbell and Tarun Ramadorai are skeptical of nudges, drawing on recent research showing their limited success in getting people to persistently increase savings (due to “leakage” at various stages) or reduce debt (because gains in one account are offset by borrowing elsewhere). Instead, they advocate more “shoves” (evidently another Cass Sunstein coinage, albeit one I hadn’t heard before).
Finally, they outline a “starter kit” for personal finance that could be designed by a regulatory agency and made widely available.
In one sense, this book is up to the minute, drawing on the most recent scholarship. In another, it feels like a blast from the past—recalling the debates that were vibrant in the run-up to and aftermath of the financial crisis but have since faded. Hopefully, this book will help reignite them.
The book begins by documenting the extent of financial illiteracy. (I was shocked that one question people often got wrong was: if you earn 2% interest on $100 over five years, how much do you end up with? The correct answer was “More than $102”—it didn’t even require understanding compounding.) It also explains some of the sources of this illiteracy, including behavioral biases in thinking about the future; the lack of reinforcement learning when financial decisions have consequences decades later; and the social fact that people talk about personal finance even less than sex (the authors’ observation, not mine!). Companies, of course, don’t suffer from these issues, and their complex, opaque products—with bundling, hidden fees, and other traps—are often designed to exploit them.
John Campbell and Tarun Ramadorai are skeptical of nudges, drawing on recent research showing their limited success in getting people to persistently increase savings (due to “leakage” at various stages) or reduce debt (because gains in one account are offset by borrowing elsewhere). Instead, they advocate more “shoves” (evidently another Cass Sunstein coinage, albeit one I hadn’t heard before).
Finally, they outline a “starter kit” for personal finance that could be designed by a regulatory agency and made widely available.
In one sense, this book is up to the minute, drawing on the most recent scholarship. In another, it feels like a blast from the past—recalling the debates that were vibrant in the run-up to and aftermath of the financial crisis but have since faded. Hopefully, this book will help reignite them.
April 18, 2026
A solid mix of an economics textbook, self help book and policy polemic. If you are economics literate, I would recommend this as a source for understanding the financial instruments and decisions you will almost certainly make during your life.
The book is organized into three sections, a first on general concepts like adverse selection or sharpe ratios, a second on four categories of personal finance, liquidity provision (eg. Credit cards), large leveraged purchases (student debt, houses), saving (retirement, investment) and insurance. The third section goes over where the system breaks, and policy prescriptions on how to fix it.
The second section was the most useful because it gives you a serious economic intuition for how these instruments and decisions work and what optimal decision making looks like with them. It also gave a great overview of recent empirical literature from personal finance, a new field of economics that has emerged over the past 20 years. I liked that between the two coauthors, they bought experience and evidence from the UK, America, India and Denmark, preventing the scope from being overly US centric, which is often the case.
I'd recommend the middle section to most given how abysmal most personal finance books are. They feel written for children. That said, the literature cited in this book corroborates most standard personal finance advice, albeit without the moralism.
It was interesting to see so much behavioral economics in this book and Ramadorai's work, as behavioral tools in academic econ feel much less prominent 20 years on from Nudge. Yet in personal finance they are convincingly relevant. A reoccurring dynamic is financial instruments redistributing from sophisticated to unsophisticated consumers. For example, low teaser rates will be offered on insurance or mortgages, which then increase. Sophisticated consumers will change to another teaser rate offering insurer, or refinance their mortgage, while unsophisticated consumers will fail to act optimally, thereby paying extra, covering the cost of the initial teaser rate. There is similar evidence for bounded rationality in saving behaviors, especially as societies transition from defined benefit (guaranteed payments in retirement by employer/gov) to defined contribution plans (where employees put money away).
Yet Ramadorai and Campbell are critical of Nudges, citing empirical work showing prominent nuges' effect is at best over exaggerated or at worst harmful. Natural experiments for example on default pension contributions, one of the strongest applications of nuges where people have to opt out of putting some of their salary in their pension, show they can lead people to save less. They also cite evidence that previous attempts to regulate instruments have failed, such as the US CARD act, due to whiley adaptations by firms.
They instead suggest a "shove" approach, involving "muscular government action". They cite as inspiration the Israeli mortgage reform, where only 3 default types of mortgages were made available, with additional tweaks possible. I don't know enough about the personal finance empirical literature to evaluate this, but am some what convinced due to how contingent personal finance systems seem to be. All 4 countries studied in the book have dramatically different ways of doing mortgages, short term loans and payments, even if the underlying incentives are not that different. I believe the government could shove a country into a new, better personal finance equilibrium with restricted choice, provided, as the authors say, there is sufficient regulatory room for companies to innovate.
The book is organized into three sections, a first on general concepts like adverse selection or sharpe ratios, a second on four categories of personal finance, liquidity provision (eg. Credit cards), large leveraged purchases (student debt, houses), saving (retirement, investment) and insurance. The third section goes over where the system breaks, and policy prescriptions on how to fix it.
The second section was the most useful because it gives you a serious economic intuition for how these instruments and decisions work and what optimal decision making looks like with them. It also gave a great overview of recent empirical literature from personal finance, a new field of economics that has emerged over the past 20 years. I liked that between the two coauthors, they bought experience and evidence from the UK, America, India and Denmark, preventing the scope from being overly US centric, which is often the case.
I'd recommend the middle section to most given how abysmal most personal finance books are. They feel written for children. That said, the literature cited in this book corroborates most standard personal finance advice, albeit without the moralism.
It was interesting to see so much behavioral economics in this book and Ramadorai's work, as behavioral tools in academic econ feel much less prominent 20 years on from Nudge. Yet in personal finance they are convincingly relevant. A reoccurring dynamic is financial instruments redistributing from sophisticated to unsophisticated consumers. For example, low teaser rates will be offered on insurance or mortgages, which then increase. Sophisticated consumers will change to another teaser rate offering insurer, or refinance their mortgage, while unsophisticated consumers will fail to act optimally, thereby paying extra, covering the cost of the initial teaser rate. There is similar evidence for bounded rationality in saving behaviors, especially as societies transition from defined benefit (guaranteed payments in retirement by employer/gov) to defined contribution plans (where employees put money away).
Yet Ramadorai and Campbell are critical of Nudges, citing empirical work showing prominent nuges' effect is at best over exaggerated or at worst harmful. Natural experiments for example on default pension contributions, one of the strongest applications of nuges where people have to opt out of putting some of their salary in their pension, show they can lead people to save less. They also cite evidence that previous attempts to regulate instruments have failed, such as the US CARD act, due to whiley adaptations by firms.
They instead suggest a "shove" approach, involving "muscular government action". They cite as inspiration the Israeli mortgage reform, where only 3 default types of mortgages were made available, with additional tweaks possible. I don't know enough about the personal finance empirical literature to evaluate this, but am some what convinced due to how contingent personal finance systems seem to be. All 4 countries studied in the book have dramatically different ways of doing mortgages, short term loans and payments, even if the underlying incentives are not that different. I believe the government could shove a country into a new, better personal finance equilibrium with restricted choice, provided, as the authors say, there is sufficient regulatory room for companies to innovate.
January 12, 2026
As someone who recently graduated college and started working, I found the information in this book incredibly valuable. Reverse mortgages, Roth IRAs, one's replacement rate during retirement, and FRMs/ARMs are just a few of the terms we hear thrown around as young adults. "What do these all mean?" we ponder whimsically. "When will someone explain these to me so that I can become a Real Adult?"
Unfortunately, as the authors point out in the very first chapter of Fixed, no one is going to explain these terms to you. In fact, there are entire industries whose sole purpose is to make them as confusing as possible while accruing market power and charging rent. A striking example from this book is how banks handled overdraft fees until very recently: at the end of the day, transactions were retroactively re-ordered so that the most expensive ones came first. This allowed financial institutions to charge additional overdraft fees on transactions that the consumer had sufficient funds to cover at the time of payment (this practice was recently outlawed in the United States).
More broadly, this book gives you the intuition you need to survive in our modern world of adversarial financial services. Credit card benefits only exist because people who are worse off than you -- or worse at planning -- subsidize them through late fees. A checking account has a high implicit cost given the interest one fails to accrue. The primary source of revenue from home ownership is rent -- not rising home equity -- and the primary form of rent is rent that owners are not paying by virtue of occupying the home.
Reading this book will help you internalize -- through hundreds of real life examples -- a handful of very important truths about the financial industry. Most people know very little about how to manage their income and wealth. The majority of people -- including those earning high wages -- are unable to accurately assess the relative costs of financial services and the likelihood of long tail events such as extreme longevity. Most of us are very emotional, and most of us would benefit from following a standard playbook that protects against extreme risks and optimizes for security in retirement.
Throughout the book, the authors discuss how government regulation and incentives could remedy many of the issues that plague personal finance. I think some of the less positive reviews of this book are from people who disagree and feel that the government ought not intervene. While I personally found the authors' arguments compelling (it's hard to argue that this market is efficient), I think these reviews are unduly harsh. The book offers an unparalleled, comprehensive overview of personal finance, and while the authors do have an opinion on how it ought to be fixed, they are not overbearing or overly dogmatic. In presenting their argument, they have also managed to write an incredibly engaging primer on the subject as a whole, and I think this is commendable and worthy of five stars. I plan to re-read this book in the future and will be recommending it to students in High School who are beginning to embark on their own personal finance journeys.
Unfortunately, as the authors point out in the very first chapter of Fixed, no one is going to explain these terms to you. In fact, there are entire industries whose sole purpose is to make them as confusing as possible while accruing market power and charging rent. A striking example from this book is how banks handled overdraft fees until very recently: at the end of the day, transactions were retroactively re-ordered so that the most expensive ones came first. This allowed financial institutions to charge additional overdraft fees on transactions that the consumer had sufficient funds to cover at the time of payment (this practice was recently outlawed in the United States).
More broadly, this book gives you the intuition you need to survive in our modern world of adversarial financial services. Credit card benefits only exist because people who are worse off than you -- or worse at planning -- subsidize them through late fees. A checking account has a high implicit cost given the interest one fails to accrue. The primary source of revenue from home ownership is rent -- not rising home equity -- and the primary form of rent is rent that owners are not paying by virtue of occupying the home.
Reading this book will help you internalize -- through hundreds of real life examples -- a handful of very important truths about the financial industry. Most people know very little about how to manage their income and wealth. The majority of people -- including those earning high wages -- are unable to accurately assess the relative costs of financial services and the likelihood of long tail events such as extreme longevity. Most of us are very emotional, and most of us would benefit from following a standard playbook that protects against extreme risks and optimizes for security in retirement.
Throughout the book, the authors discuss how government regulation and incentives could remedy many of the issues that plague personal finance. I think some of the less positive reviews of this book are from people who disagree and feel that the government ought not intervene. While I personally found the authors' arguments compelling (it's hard to argue that this market is efficient), I think these reviews are unduly harsh. The book offers an unparalleled, comprehensive overview of personal finance, and while the authors do have an opinion on how it ought to be fixed, they are not overbearing or overly dogmatic. In presenting their argument, they have also managed to write an incredibly engaging primer on the subject as a whole, and I think this is commendable and worthy of five stars. I plan to re-read this book in the future and will be recommending it to students in High School who are beginning to embark on their own personal finance journeys.
November 29, 2025
More of a 3.5/5. This is a good book on the whole, and I’m a huge fan of John and Tarun’s academic work. Two points which sprung to mind:
1. The book focuses heavily on the concept of a ‘shrouded equilibrium’, where unsophisticated households effectively cross-subsidise more sophisticated ones. The book is extremely pessimistic on the prospect of increasing the sophistication of the former group, and instead pushes more regulation-centric solutions. I’m not sure I even necessarily disagree with this, but it’s interesting that finance seems to be the one area that economists are pessimistic on the value of education.
2. I think the book underrates the impact AI will have on household finance. This will greatly help in demystifying confusing products and performing calculations that unsophisticated households would struggle with. Whether those who would benefit from the use of this technology will indeed adopt it is a separate and interesting question.
1. The book focuses heavily on the concept of a ‘shrouded equilibrium’, where unsophisticated households effectively cross-subsidise more sophisticated ones. The book is extremely pessimistic on the prospect of increasing the sophistication of the former group, and instead pushes more regulation-centric solutions. I’m not sure I even necessarily disagree with this, but it’s interesting that finance seems to be the one area that economists are pessimistic on the value of education.
2. I think the book underrates the impact AI will have on household finance. This will greatly help in demystifying confusing products and performing calculations that unsophisticated households would struggle with. Whether those who would benefit from the use of this technology will indeed adopt it is a separate and interesting question.
April 22, 2026
I really enjoyed this book, and I’m probably biased because I’m a fan of this topic. The authors discuss how capitalist systems around the world are rigged against lower-class people. I like these books because for most of my life, I was broke and blamed myself a lot for my financial situation. It wasn’t until I was much older and realized the issues with capitalism and how broke people are set up to stay broke.
The authors dive into issues with banking, loans, financial education, and many other struggles lower-income people face. It’s an extremely important book because we need to understand these topics before we can actually start helping people. For those ignorant about how the system actually works, this book will help them stop blaming people for their problems and realize that the game is rigged and a lot of people aren’t in a position to get themselves out of the financial hole they're in.
There are times when the book dives into complex topics that can get a little boring, like taxes and mortgages, but it’s an overall phenomenal book.
The authors dive into issues with banking, loans, financial education, and many other struggles lower-income people face. It’s an extremely important book because we need to understand these topics before we can actually start helping people. For those ignorant about how the system actually works, this book will help them stop blaming people for their problems and realize that the game is rigged and a lot of people aren’t in a position to get themselves out of the financial hole they're in.
There are times when the book dives into complex topics that can get a little boring, like taxes and mortgages, but it’s an overall phenomenal book.
March 27, 2026
Some really interesting perspectives on how the status quo in finance militates against the poor. Most fairly obvious, but nice to have the details, a few less so. So in that sense it’s an important and useful book. Not exactly a page turner, which raises the fundamental contradiction within. Is it written for the disadvantaged or those who might be able to influence the debate. Both are valid, but I think that there might have been a way of doing both. To be fair, as one of the other reviewers notes, it is a useful primer for those confident enough to understand, just not currently well-versed in, finance.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews