Editor’s Note: Beginning in January 2026, Sentinel articles will run first in our Substack newsletter. We hope you’ll join us as a subscriber. If you prefer to read articles on our website, they will become free to all 12 months after initial publication. Contact editorial manager Amy Laburda if you have any questions.
Good financial planning makes for bad storytelling. This is probably why there’s such a shortage of financial professionals behaving well in movies and on TV.
In the famous opening lines of “Anna Karenina,” Leo Tolstoy wrote “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” With apologies to Tolstoy, you could similarly observe that all good financial planners share the same basic approach. Proper financial planning means gradually saving for long-term goals, prudently looking toward the future, and insuring against risk: all important tasks, none of which is especially entertaining. Bad financial planning can lead to suspense, drama, horror or worse.
Money and financial professionals frequently play a role in our entertainment, of course. But just as some medical professionals find the hospital drama of a show like “Grey’s Anatomy” unrealistic, it can be hard for real-life financial professionals to watch their work in dramatized form without some serious eye-rolling.
Risking It All
Many shows and movies focus on the thrill of huge risks paying off. Unfortunately, that means they are stories more accurately about gambling, not financial planning. Sometimes this is explicit. Movies such as “Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory” and “In the Heights” focus on the exhilaration of beating the odds in actual lotteries or sweepstakes. Other films, like “The Social Network,”center on the drama of visionary entrepreneurs or inventors taking huge swings and reaping the rewards. To a lesser degree, this latter category also explains the popularity of the show “Shark Tank” (which I’ve already expressed my opinions about elsewhere).
Whether stories focus on actual gambling or taking a huge business risk, this category focuses on the payoff of beating the odds. Most characters — or contestants — may lose out, but the promise of a big reward becomes real for at least some of them. These stories can be fun and exciting. But they understate or sometimes fully misrepresent just how rare it is for a high-risk, low-odds bet to work out. After all, no one made a movie focusing on one of the thousands of children who bought Wonka bars with no golden ticket inside.
Endless Indulgence
A common financial objective is to secure a comfortable lifestyle, or even to enjoy a luxurious one. There is nothing inherently wrong with this goal. But when it comes to entertainment, we have learned that watching others spend money can be a vicarious thrill on its own. There are plenty of shows, from “Lifestyles of the Rich & Famous” decades ago to “Selling Sunset” today, that have claimed to portray the “reality” of how the ultrarich live.
Many viewers today are savvy enough to know that a lot of production and editing goes into these shows, even if they are classified as reality TV. Even so, that knowledge hasn’t dented their popularity. For example, MTV Cribs ran new episodes from 2000 until 2022, even though it was widely known that many celebrities lied about their homes and possessions to make for better TV.
Wall Street Stories
There are plenty of financial professionals in stories about stock trading, hedge funds, and the broader financial system. These films and shows may have ties to reality (“The Wolf of Wall Street,” “The Big Short”) or they may be pure fiction (“Wall Street,” “Billions”). In either case, they tend to turn the drama up to maximum. For my purposes, none of them include true financial planning the way it relates to my own profession. I might enjoy the films “Glengarry Glen Ross” or “Boiler Room,” but the kind of sales tactics those movies center on is not something any reputable financial firm would endorse. Of course there are disreputable firms and individuals out there, too. They are poor sources of financial advice, but they make for better entertainment.
Can Taxes Be Entertaining?
If you’re looking for films about taxes or tax professionals, you won’t find much. The most popular film about accountants may be “The Accountant”, where Ben Affleck is a quiet accountant who moonlights as an unstoppable hitman. The film was so successful that we got “The Accountant 2”, which received worse reviews than the original for reasons including that it involves significantly less accounting in its plot. While the first movie spends time discussing the basics of the home office deduction, the second film does not provide any useful tax tips.
“The Shawshank Redemption” attempted to show that accounting skills can come in handy if one ends up wrongfully convicted and sentenced to life in prison. The film takes place more than 50 years ago, and it’s possible that someone like Andy Dufresne could have used his skills to stay safe and protected back then. Today it would be difficult to entrust sensitive financial data, plus the necessary computer hardware and software, to someone in the same situation.
Fictional Financial Planners
Unfortunately, when a true financial planner does show up on screen, they are not often portrayed in the most flattering light. The most prominent fictional financial planner in recent fiction is probably Marty Byrde, Jason Bateman’s character from the series “Ozark.” For those who haven’t watched the show, I will just say that having a drug cartel as your primary client is not a great way to keep your Certified Financial Planner® credential, which in real life includes an ethics requirement.
Even a concept as simple as “investing with a reputable bank” can get a hard treatment in fiction. If you haven’t seen the “and it’s gone!” scene from “South Park” do yourself a favor and check it out.
While writing choices like the ones I’ve mentioned are made in the pursuit of entertaining stories, I do worry that these portrayals discourage some viewers from asking for professional help when managing their money. I suspect I am not the only one worried about this, either. The CFP® Board’s public awareness initiative may, in part, be an attempt to make sure the public gets at least some positive messages about financial professionals.
Better Examples
I’ve been tough on many films and TV series in this article. So I want to leave you with a couple of viewing recommendations that get a lot of things right.
Documentaries have the advantage of, generally, attempting to educate as much as they entertain. ESPN’s documentary “Broke” (part of its “30 for 30” series) struck me as an especially strong illustration of the way that wealth, for most, is not at all infinite. The 2012 film opens with the statistic that “By the time they have been retired for two years, 78 percent of former NFL players have gone bankrupt or are under financial stress; within five years of retirement, an estimated 60 percent of former NBA players are broke.” It then explores why athletes who command such high salaries in their prime struggle with financial security.
Even though the film is more than a decade old, it is a compelling exploration of the factors that make managing a windfall so challenging, especially for professional athletes. It should be required viewing for all young people with sports aspirations, and maybe even more widely, to show how complicated managing finances can be. At this writing, “Broke” is available to stream on Netflix in the U.S.
My other recommendation is the HBO series “Succession.” While the series is undoubtedly dramatic, it gets a surprising amount correct. Its portrayal of the complications with estate and business succession planning is not as over the top as you might imagine when a family comes to the process with existing tension and outsized egos. “Succession” does occasionally tap into the fantasy of luxurious, over-the-top spending. But the show’s overall tone makes it clear that wealth is by no means a path to happiness.
As a personal finance and estate planner, I can say with confidence that “Succession” is a great illustration of what not to do, and one that doesn’t veer too far into the realm of pure fantasy.
In the end, movies and TV shows shouldn’t be considered a particularly useful source of information about real world professions in general, and certainly not about what financial planning looks like. Good personal financial planning will not keep you on the edge of your seat. It will, however, help you keep the drama out of your budget and on your screen, where it belongs.
