The best books on building a wealth mindset

I interviewed Rachel Rodgers on the inaugural episode of the Holistic Wealth podcast, where she shared her story of doubling her income from $2 million to 5 million during a global pandemic.

The interview struck a cord and is still one of the most popular podcast episodes today. I read the book and really liked the focus on wealth mindset for women. Rachel has also had to overcome the death of her father as a child, and that also resonated with me as I stated in my book how my kids also lost their father at a young age.

Whatever struggles we all go through in life, we can rest assured that there is always hope. I love books that outline these struggles and victories. 

You Are a Badass at Making Money is a solid read.

Drawing on her own transformation—over just a few years—from a woman living in a converted garage with tumbleweeds blowing through her bank account to a woman who travels the world in style, Jen Sincero outlines practical ways for achieving goals.

She combines funny personal essays with bite-size concepts that will resonate with readers. 

I have been on Ramit’s “The Rich Life” newsletter list for many years now and as an author I find his insights to be authentic and genuine for couples and individuals alike.

The book has now sold over 1 million copies. I like his practical, no-nonsense approach to personal finance. My favorite thing about this book is the author’s emphasis on automation.

Ramit teaches that automating your financial goals, including saving and investing goals, is key to actually accomplishing those goals. His experience as a child of immigrants adds to this book’s authentic insight.

His latest documentary on Netflix How to Get Rich (“Money has power over us but doesn’t have to”) also expands and gives further insights. 

I’ve been personally teaching and coaching women about transforming their relationship with money with my work at the Institute on Holistic Wealth, including issues such as financial trauma and money/wealth mindset and one of the major issues women face is a lack of confidence.

A fear of failure, negative thought patterns as well as environmental factors all play a role in women’s lack of confidence.
Here are the 3 most empowering lessons I got out of this book: confidence is a connector between what we think and what we do, stereotypes and innate differences between men and women cause women to hold back, and confidence can be learned, even if we’re not predisposed to it.

Katty Kay and Claire Shipman were also recently named Holistic Wealth Trailblazers by the Institute on Holistic Wealth because of their work in empowering women. 

I also interviewed Reshma Saujani on the Holistic Wealth podcast – also one of our most popular episodes.

She’s the founder of Girls Who Code, Marshall Plan for Moms and is working to close the gender gap in the tech sector and more recently advocating for moms during the global pandemic. I’m a big fan of immigrant stories and her parents’ story of how they came to the United States as refugees in 1973 from India is inspiring.

In her book Pay Up, she outlines how society has sold women an unsustainable narrative - that to break glass ceiling and succeed in their careers, all they needed to do is “dream big, raise their hands, and lean in”. However, fifty-one percent of women say that their mental health has declined, while anxiety and depression rates have skyrocketed.

In the book, Reshma dismantles the myth of “having it all” and lifts the burden we place on individual women to be primary caregivers, and to work around a system built for and by men. Reshma basically outlines that our wealth mindset needs to be much broader than “corporate feminism”.

Reshma was also recently named as a Holistic Wealth Trailblazer by the Institute on Holistic Wealth.