The best books that influenced the financial life planning movement

Jacob Needleman’s Money and the Meaning of Life is the most influential and inspiring book by far for the development of life planning movement in financial advice.

A masterful storyteller with his own set of characters, Needleman guides us into the mystery of how money works and what money is really about. Going back and forth between money’s practicalities and the deeper longings we all have for freedom, he challenges us to explore what freedom really means in relation to money.

A page-turner of speculative philosophy, I can still remember how gripping the final 20 pages were. In his exploration of money and meaning, Needleman tells the story of life planning, which is the story of each of our aspirations for freedom, and then the path to accomplish them. 

Dante's Divine Comedy is an epic poem in three volumes. It's perhaps the most beautiful poetry the world has ever seen.

Read it in Italian! Even if you can't read Italian, read it in Italian. Read it out loud, and you'll see what I mean. The language is so beautiful. Then read it in translation.

In it, Dante describes three worlds. The inferno is hell. An intermediate world called purgatory represents the hardest efforts that we make to be good people on Earth. The third volume is paradise.

The entire book was a huge influence on my early writing, which launched the life planning movement. My first book was divided into three segments: Childhood (inferno), Adulthood (purgatory), and Maturity (paradise), representing “the hero’s journey.”

This is a fundamental text of Tibetan Buddhism. The Dalai Lama speaks about it widely. Although it's not well-known in the West, there have been half a dozen to a dozen translations of it in my lifetime. I like them all. Batchelor's was one of the first.

As an 8th-century guidebook to meditation, Shantideva reveals a timeless set of virtues that I mapped against the stages in my book. As a professional, I was a financial adviser, and now I train financial advisers in the listening skills that foster great life planning. Meditation and virtues are the keys to that facilitation. Shantideva helped me bridge those two worlds.

Translated many times under different titles, this is my favorite edition, influencing my life planning journey. The text is an intermingling of Buddhist, Taoist, and Confucian thought.

Huanchu Daoren (who goes by various names) was a retired civil servant, as were many great philosophers and mystics in China. His book is written in brief paragraphs, each paragraph is a teaching of ethics or of spirit.

I carried a tiny version of the book that fit in the palm of my hand wherever I went for about ten years when I was going through the toughest time in my life just to give myself encouragement. Whenever I dipped into it, reading three or four sentences, I would feel as if there was something more profound than what I was going through. 

Hamlet is the story of a child of inherited wealth, a trust fund baby. Hamlet’s money was taken from him by his uncle who killed his father and married his mother.

It's complicated psychologically, but it's the story of someone trying to come into adulthood, which is what life planning really is. How do you become the person you're really meant to be? Hamlet was trying to figure out how to claim his place in a very complex and corrupt world.

There are many soliloquies about finding one's voice and becoming who one's meant to be. That's the essence of life planning. Shakespeare wrote many such tales, including another tale about an estate plan gone bad, which I love, called King Lear.