Errol Morris Says He Doesn't Deserve His Money. Neither Do You.

Wealthsimple is a whole new kind of investing service. This is the latest installment of our recurring series “Money Diaries” where we ask interesting people to open up about the role money has played in their lives.

Errol Morris has a core belief about money: he doesn't deserve the money he has. And, furthermore, neither do you. If you have money, he says, you're lucky. Errol Morris, is probably the world's preeminent documentary filmmaker. He has won an Academy Award for his film Fog of War, as well as the MacArthur “Genius Grant” and a Guggenheim fellowship and his film Gates of Heaven was named one of Roger Ebert's “Ten Best Films Ever Made.” So it's not surprising that he has lots of beliefs. And you'll learn about them, and hear many interesting stories like how he used to get evicted from his apartments all the time (before he rather quickly became a millionaire) if you watch our very first Money Diaries video.

Why is Errol Morris the first person to do a video Money Diary?

Our “Money Diaries” series is meant to tell human stories. You know, interesting people opening up about how money has affected their lives. (See, it's right up there in the fine print above!) Why do we care? Because, whether they admit it or not, everyone cares. Everyone's curious about other people's money, everyone's voyeuristic, everyone's worried, and ashamed, and proud, and avaricious. So yes, the stories are fun. And money is also a nifty prism through which to tell your life story — successes, failures, brushes with disaster. But that's not really why we do it, either.

We really do “Money Diaries” because we believe people should talk more openly about money. We'd all be smarter, more informed, less anxious, and less prone to make the same mistakes over and over if we did that. It was the idea of our first unscripted ad campaign, “Investing for Humans.” And when we had that idea, we had a wish list of one director who would have unparalleled skill at getting regular people to open up and talk about money: Errol Morris. We also thought he'd make a fantastic subject himself. So we got Errol's son Hamilton — himself the host of a documentary-style show on Vice — to ask him all the personal money questions we would have been too chicken to ask ourselves.

We're happy to report the apple doesn't fall far from the tree.

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The Editors

Wealthsimple's education team is made up of writers and financial experts dedicated to making the world of finance easy to understand and not-at-all boring to read.