Big issue with author’s claim about The Barefoot Investor

An Aussie author who made extraordinary claims about The Barefoot Investor has been called out for hiding a key detail.

An Aussie author has blamed best-selling finance book The Barefoot Investor for ruining her marriage, saying her ex-husband’s obsession with following Scott Pape’s advice turned into “financial control”.

Charlotte Ree, 32, whose “bittersweet memoir” Heartbake released last month, made the comments on the SBS Insight talk show on Tuesday in an episode titled “Advice: Take It Or Leave It?”, which explored the question of “what drives us to take or ignore advice and what are the consequences”.

But some online have argued the show should have disclosed that Ree, in addition to being an author, has a “conflict of interest” as head of marketing at Pan Macmillan, a rival publisher.

Author Charlotte Ree on SBS Insight. Picture: SBS

“The fact that she subtly promoted her own cookbook while indirectly criticising a rival author only adds to the concern,” one Reddit user wrote.

“There seemed to be absolutely no disclosure that this guest was actually the head of marketing at a major Australian book publisher that would be considered a competitor [to HarperCollins, publisher of The Barefoot Investor].”

Reached for comment on Thursday, Ree directed enquiries to Allen & Unwin, publisher of Heartbake.

“We won’t be commenting at this time,” a spokeswoman said.

In the prerecorded SBS Insight segment, Ree recounted how when she got married her mother explicitly advised her not to share her money or join bank accounts.

The Barefoot Investor by Scott Pape. Picture: Wiley

“I just ignored her and went blindly into it,” she said.

“My husband and I were gifted a copy of The Barefoot Investor by Scott Pape. Barefoot Investor is full of financial advice – my husband took that like a gospel. There was no sort of negotiation with him on deviating from that plan. That book has absolutely changed lives but it changed mine for the worse.”

Ree said she went to a friend for advice and realised she “needed to leave”.

“When I was in rock bottom I had no desire to cook,” she said.

“The idea of cooking for one just felt like the most desperately lonely thing in the world. But then I remembered my mum advising me that I had to take chunks out of this elephant one bite at a time, and to just cook something just for myself, something that was comforting and nurturing.”

Ree discussed the breakdown of her marriage. Picture: SBS

Asked by host Kumi Taguchi why she ignored her mother’s advice, Ree said she was “blind in love”.

But she stressed that her ex-husband was “a glorious human being who I do still love and will always love”.

“It was ultimately two people who wanted very different things,” she said.

“How the financial control, I suppose, worked for us is that I had a joint bank account with him that my monthly pay got paid into, his pay also got paid into that, although they were very different amounts, and from that all of our joint expenses came – rent, food, phone bills, electricity, internet, those sorts of things. But separate to that I was paid $100 a week as an allowance, which he also got, but it meant that if I wanted to go out for dinner with my girlfriends, if I wanted to take an Uber home, if I wanted to buy a bottle of wine, it all had to come from that $100.”

Ree said prior to this the couple never fought, but then they “fought all of the time”

The episode explored ‘what drives us to take or ignore advice’. Picture: SBS

“We fought a lot about money, which was his way of controlling that, and then inevitably we fought about sex, because that was my way of having some sort of control over myself,” she said.

They went to a couple’s counsellor for a year but “ultimately there was no middle ground to be found”.

SBS and Pape declined to comment.

The finance expert’s 2016 book, The Barefoot Investor: The Only Money Guide You’ll Ever Need, is the highest-ever selling title in Australia with more than two million copies sold.

“No one expected it to sell any more than about 20,000 copies – it’s a finance book,” the father-of-four told the Herald Sun in 2021. “But it took on a life of its own. Not a day goes by that I don’t get somebody writing to me telling me how they have used the book to help their family.”

His two follow-ups, The Barefoot Investor for Families and Barefoot Kids: Your Epic Money Adventure, have also been bestsellers.

Pape makes regular TV and radio appearances, and is also a weekly newspaper columnist for News Corp, publisher of this website.