The Psychology of Money

Most money books are full of get-rich-quick schemes and bad advice. This one goes to the root of why we make good or bad financial decisions.

I have a tendency to overlook the business side of writing, and this book helped me see why that might be and do something about it. Everyone has strong feelings about money: this book helped me get mine under control and in perspective, which enables me to write better and publish the books I want to publish.

This is a book I constantly recommend when it comes to how you think about money and growing wealth.

This isn’t a get-rich-quick guide, but a breakdown of how you view your financial position and what lenses you can apply to make the best decisions to position yourself for the best outcome. Luck and risk will always be a factor, but if you prepare for these and work them into your plan, you’ll be prepared for anything.

This work was completely unexpected! Rather than being an academic writing on money, psychology, etc., it is written in a storytelling manner that made the concepts come alive. Each chapter begins with a saying that ties the chapter’s concepts together.

Human behavioral and thinking foibles such as feeling to never have enough, the difference between getting wealthy and staying wealthy, wealth is what you don’t see, how most of Warren Buffett’s came later in life (the concept of compounding coming alive), and many more concepts are covered in an easy to understand manner.

I found myself having to slow down… show more.

The Psychology of Money is the best book about money to date on the realities of money and how people think and act, explaining why most of us feel the way we do about money. Every advisor must read this book and most clients as well.

The author makes the point that behavior is hard to teach, even to really smart people. However, ordinary folks with no financial education can be wealthy if they have a handful of behavioral skills that have nothing to do with formal measures of intelligence. In other words, how you behave is more important than… show more.

The Psychology of Money is the best book to be released in the last 50 years that clearly shows how and why we manage our money the way we do.

Housel takes a refreshingly realistic view of how people behave. We all know we should eat well and exercise, but we don’t. The same can be said about what we should do with our money. With that as the backdrop, Morgan Housel emphasizes that if we can make good money decisions sometimes, we will still be okay. He also permits us to make mistakes and do what is reasonable. 

The… show more.

Can you have a top five investing book list without including the most popular book published this century in this genre?

Any good book on finance must balance the need to simplify a complex topic for a wide audience while not leaving out important details and context. The Psychology of Money threads that needle and is both an easy read and filled with nuggets of wisdom that can help you make better decisions with money.

How a book about money is so interesting is beyond me (I assume it has something to do with the author truly understanding, ahem, psychology). But this one is getting rave reviews for good reason. It’s almost addictive to read. Using nineteen short stories, it explores how historical figures navigated wealth, shows you why it was either a winning or losing strategy, and helps you apply to see the relevance to your own financial situation. This book will suck you in and make you realize that a lot of your own financial decisions shouldn’t be made on paper-only.