Conflicts of Interest

It is nearly impossible to get financial advice without a conflict of interest of some type being present. Like with a medical presentation, it is important that a presenter show their conflicts of interest so you can properly evaluate the bias in their presentation.

From the day WCI began in 2011, it has been a for-profit business. That has not changed, and it most likely will not ever change.

Why Bother Being For-Profit at All?

The primary goal at WCI is to assist people who dedicate long hours to healing and helping others avoid getting taken advantage of by financial professionals and to help them reach financial independence. However, altruism sometimes has some bounds. We've found that making a profit provides the additional motivation to work hard.

There are many expenses involved in running a business like this, and being a for-profit business allows us to accomplish things that require money. These include:

• The White Coat Investor Scholarship: Hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash plus tens of thousands in prizes have been given directly to students over the years.
• The Champions Program: The White Coat Investor's Guide for Students was published early in 2021, primarily to be given away to first-year medical and dental students. We send it to as many as 70% of first-year students each year, and over the years, we've given away millions of dollars worth of books.
• The Financial Educator Award: Since 2019, we have given away a cash prize to encourage docs to teach financial principles to each other and their trainees.
• Put on a conference: WCICON is the biggest financial risk we take each year, but it allows us to meet with the audience face to face each year and learn from some incredible presenters in our community.
• Hire staff: There are literally dozens of people working here at WCI, including full-time employees, part-time employees, and a number of independent contractors. For some reason, they all want to be paid every month, have health insurance, send their kids to college, and come have fun trips with their teammates at work. WCI would not exist without its staff.

To accomplish what WCI is trying to accomplish, it MUST be a for-profit business.

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How WCI Makes Money

There are really four ways to make money on the internet. The first is by selling ads, and the second is by selling the products of others. Whether you get paid a flat rate for putting up an ad, get paid by the click on those ads, or get paid only when the seller actually makes a sale (affiliate marketing), the conflict of interest is the same. If those ads don't eventually result in sales generating more revenue than the ads cost, the advertisers (and their revenue) go away. While WCI works hard to try to promote the good people in the financial services industry and run “the bad guys” out of business, it's impossible to control everything that every single one of those advertisers ever did in the past or will do in the future. We sold them an ad; we're not running their company. That said, if you don't think an advertiser is up to the standards of The White Coat Investor community, we want to hear about it. We can often resolve issues much faster than you can. Multiple unresolved complaints eliminate the privilege to advertise here pretty darn quickly.

“Affiliate marketing relationships” often take on different forms of business to make sure you get served well and that we get paid fairly. In 2023, for instance, WCI actually started an insurance agency. That wasn't because WCI had any interest in selling insurance (WCI has never actually been the primary agent on any policy). We simply wanted to make sure you were treated well and we were paid fairly for the referrals we were generating. We needed an agency to do that. It turns out that insurance agents can't legally make any sort of affiliate payment to anyone other than another insurance agent. That move turned out to be a wise one, both for you and for WCI.

Similarly, we started StudentLoanAdvice.com in 2021, and we are the majority owners of that service. Good for you. Good for us. But it's a little unique as business marketing relationships go. Is there a conflict of interest because we get paid when you buy insurance or some coaching on your student loans? Sure. But it's the exact same conflict of interest we had back when we were selling flat fee ads for those same services. Either you buy those services, or our revenue from the referrals goes away pretty quickly.

The other two ways to make money on the internet are to sell our own products (online courses, books, the conference, and swag) and our own services (consulting, speaking, writing, etc.). The obvious conflict of interest here is that if you don't buy it, we don't make anything, putting us in the role of salespeople. Once you understand how money is made on the internet, our conflicts of interest become obvious.

WCI Conflict of Interests

As a reminder, here is a comprehensive list of our conflicts of interest:

1. We are incentivized to run content that relates to our advertisers’ businesses more frequently than other content. The content team is mostly separate from the business team, but the conflict still exists.
2. We are incentivized to accept guest posts from financial professionals who advertise with us more frequently than those who do not, despite our policy to judge guest posts purely on the basis of the content. We do our best to follow it. We run very few sponsored posts and only to fund the WCI Scholarship, and even those generally have exceptionally high content quality.
3. We are incentivized to recommend you purchase term life and disability insurance policies through our recommended agents.
4. We are incentivized to recommend you refinance your student loans when perhaps it would not be a good move for you. This hasn't happened before, but we are certainly incentivized to do so.
5. We are incentivized to recommend you seek out professional help with insurance, financial planning, investment management, student loan advice, purchasing and selling real estate, negotiating contracts, getting burnout coaching, and preparing your taxes when perhaps you could do some of that on your own.
6. Since we have real estate advertisers, we are incentivized to discuss real estate investments more frequently than we otherwise might or more than we discuss traditional investments like index funds or alternative investments for which we do not have advertising partners.
7. We are incentivized to accept advertisers who do not meet our high standards for recommendation to friends and family. We are constantly vigilant to minimize this conflict.
8. We are incentivized to recommend you read financial books, including and especially our own.
9. We are incentivized to recommend you take our financial courses and those of our affiliate partners.
10. We are incentivized to recommend you attend WCICON.
11. We are incentivized to encourage you to purchase from the WCI Store.
12. We are incentivized against recommending content by others who have the same affiliate marketing partners or who compete for the same advertisers.
13. We are incentivized to recommend you use the WCI Forum over other forums, the White Coat Investors Facebook group over others, the WCI subreddit over other subs, and the Financially Empowered Women (FEW) group.

For more information on how we make money and our conflicts of interest, we publish a “State of the Blog” post every January to remind our readers what we do and why we do it.

You may also be interested in WCI's Privacy Policy.