Here are 100 books that Happy Money fans have personally recommended if you like
Happy Money.
Shepherd is a community of 11,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.
Shepherd is reader supported. When you buy books, we may earn an affiliate commission.
I was a finance major who worked in banking, so I knew what I needed to do with money, but I found it challenging to follow through. The books I previously read were money books written by financial gurus who always used yelling and shaming as their teaching method. It never aligned with me. I started writing books with more compassion and an understanding that there are other variables affecting your financial health. I continue to read and recommend books written by people who aspire to help others by giving them knowledge and the space and grace to grow without the guilt trip.
I really enjoyed reading this book because it was like sitting with a friend. I was quickly drawn in by Erin's first story about her Krispy Kreme donut, which started her financial journey.
She has a great way of explaining seemingly complex financial topics in easy-to-understand lingo. I think that’s what makes this book a great starter read on money. It’s simple yet impactful.
Stop Living Paycheck to Paycheck and Get Your Financial Life Together (#GYFLT)!
If you’re a cash-strapped 20- or 30-something, it’s easy to get freaked out by finances. But you’re not doomed to spend your life drowning in debt or mystified by money. It’s time to stop scraping by and take control of your money and your life with this savvy and smart guide.
Broke Millennial shows step-by-step how to go from flat-broke to financial badass. Unlike most personal finance books out there, it doesn’t just cover boring stuff like credit card debt,…
Black women's mental wellness is important to me because my racial identity was interrupted by racial assimilation. There was a period of time where I thought passing for white would lead me to the success I sought. I learned that adopting white norms and values as my own was psychologically harmful, and these books led to racial restoration and mental well-being. I am an associate professor of clinical mental health, and I teach my students to assess, identify, and promote healthy racial identity development. I hope readers who are on their journeys will find these books helpful.
Much of my financial nonsense was taught, indirectly and directly, by my parents, family, and community members. Coming from a low-income and blue-collar working-class family, I am armed with a mentality toward poverty.
This book was written in plain language about saving, budgeting, investing, and wealth building. The steps were practical and easy enough for me to implement. Because of this book, I have a plan for my money; I know exactly where it goes, and I am an investor. These are no longer things I thought were reserved for white people.
NEW YORK TIMES, WALL STREET JOURNAL, AND USA TODAY BESTSELLER • A ten-step plan for finding peace, safety, and harmony with your money—no matter how big or small your goals and no matter how rocky the market might be—by the inspiring and savvy “Budgetnista.”
“No matter where you stand in your money journey, Get Good with Money has a lesson or two for you!”—Erin Lowry, bestselling author of the Broke Millennial series
Tiffany Aliche was a successful pre-school teacher with a healthy nest egg when a recession and advice from a shady advisor put her out of a job and…
I was a finance major who worked in banking, so I knew what I needed to do with money, but I found it challenging to follow through. The books I previously read were money books written by financial gurus who always used yelling and shaming as their teaching method. It never aligned with me. I started writing books with more compassion and an understanding that there are other variables affecting your financial health. I continue to read and recommend books written by people who aspire to help others by giving them knowledge and the space and grace to grow without the guilt trip.
This was one of the first money books I read because it was recommended by a friend. I liked how easy it was to read, and I learned a great deal.
Although, at first, it read a bit “bro-ey,” his humor grew on me. I like its direct approach to money without the jargon and confusion. I also learned that the updated version has changed a bit to reflect less in-your-face and more about giving us space.
The groundbreaking NEW YORK TIMES and WALL STREET JOURNAL BESTSELLER that taught a generation how to earn more, save more, and live a rich life—now in a revised 2nd edition.
Buy as many lattes as you want. Choose the right accounts and investments so your money grows for you—automatically. Best of all, spend guilt-free on the things you love.
Personal finance expert Ramit Sethi has been called a “wealth wizard” by Forbes and the “new guru on the block” by Fortune. Now he’s updated and expanded his modern money classic for a new age, delivering a simple, powerful, no-BS 6-week…
I was a finance major who worked in banking, so I knew what I needed to do with money, but I found it challenging to follow through. The books I previously read were money books written by financial gurus who always used yelling and shaming as their teaching method. It never aligned with me. I started writing books with more compassion and an understanding that there are other variables affecting your financial health. I continue to read and recommend books written by people who aspire to help others by giving them knowledge and the space and grace to grow without the guilt trip.
I enjoy money books that go beyond calculations and numbers and can reach the heart and soul. Leisa’s book helped me think of money in a holistic way, using the chakras that I am familiar with through yoga.
It made me rethink my own relationship with money and how it affects not just my financial health, but my overall wellbeing.
“Leisa has a truly unique gift and has designed a path that will transform your relationship with money.”―Grant Sabatier, author of Financial Freedom and creator of Millennial Money
In the world of personal finance the biggest challenge is the sense that there’s never going to be enough. It is this mindset of scarcity, and not the amount spent on lattes, that holds people back the most from achieving their financial dreams.
Using techniques she’s developed as a financial planner and spiritual coach, Leisa Peterson guides you to dig deeper and discover the root of your financial thinking to change not…
I am the teaching pastor of Woodland Christian Church, a role I've held since 2010. I preach God’s Word 1 to 3 times weekly, and I'm also a conference speaker and author. While I do some counseling and discipling, my main focus is on teaching and preaching, which involves studying God’s Word for 20 to 30 hours per week. I've learned biblical financial principles and I'm passionate about equipping people with them. With ten children on a single-income pastor’s salary, I've had to apply these principles in my own life, which has reinforced their importance and effectiveness.
God and Money is primarily a guide to giving. Still, it is also a testimony of how the authors, while attending Harvard, became conflicted about their extravagant lifestyles and convicted of the need to give more. In other words, something enjoyable and unique about the book is that the authors discuss finances, but it is also their story.
They also use modern-day case studies and practical ways to apply the Bible’s teaching. They followed up with True Riches, pride to gratitude, coveting to content, anxiety to trust, and indifference to love are the chapter topics.
John Cortines and Gregory Baumer met as Harvard MBA candidates in a men’s Bible study and stopped asking “How much should I give?” and started asking “How much do I need to keep?” With their top-notch education and rising careers, Cortines and Baumer were guaranteed comfort and security for the rest of their lives. However, when their plans for saving and spending collided with God’s purposes for extravagant generosity, they were each compelled to make a life-changing decision that challenges the values held by mainstream America and many Christian commentators. Cortines and Baumer show not only how to radically give,…
At The Financial Diet, I’ve written and produced videos about money, productivity, and work/life balance for the better part of a decade. I’ve come to the conclusion that most of our commonly held beliefs about money and work are incorrect: your job shouldn’t be your main purpose, and money shouldn’t be the end goal in and of itself. I’ve also been a longtime nonfiction reader, and I lead a monthly book club for our Patreon members. This list is composed of my favorite selections from those meetings (a few of which I’d read previously), and I hope they invite you to question your own relationship with work and money!
This was probably the most easily digestible book on investing that I’ve ever read. To me, the most difficult part of investing is simply getting over the fear of doing it, and Morgan Housel gives genuine motivation for overcoming that fear.
The chapters are purposefully short, which allowed me to absorb the main takeaways without getting too in the weeds on details (a necessary downside of a lot of nonfiction). I loved that it included very clear examples of how our brains work against us when it comes to our finances, as well as clear advice on how to counteract that.
Doing well with money isn't necessarily about what you know. It's about how you behave. And behavior is hard to teach, even to really smart people.
Money-investing, personal finance, and business decisions-is typically taught as a math-based field, where data and formulas tell us exactly what to do. But in the real world people don't make financial decisions on a spreadsheet. They make them at the dinner table, or in a meeting room, where personal history, your own unique view of the world, ego, pride, marketing, and odd incentives are scrambled together.
In The Psychology of Money, award-winning author Morgan…
I’ve been writing about cryptocurrency since 2015, and full-time since 2017. I’ve worked for the biggest crypto news site in the world, CoinDesk, but now I write about it every day for a more mainstream audience. Cryptocurrency fits at a nexus at the kind of things I’m drawn to: It’s technological, it’s economic and it freaks people out. Unlike a lot of people who write about crypto, I’ve actually played around with the stuff. I’m not an investor, but I have used it. Using it is really the only way anyone gets to the point of grokking it, and I grok the stuff.
So this book only has one chapter on cryptocurrency (and it dismisses it), but it’s still a worthwhile addition to this list, and here’s why:
Money does a great job showing readers what a protean thing money really is and has always been. Every time money is about to make a giant change in human history, people think that change is completely crazy and will never work. And then it happens, and before long people seem to believe that money could have never worked any other way.
Does it sound relevant now?
While Goldstein eloquently explains and then dismisses Bitcoin in these pages (in fact, it’s one of the best dismissals I’ve ever read), it’s still a worthy entry for anyone who wants to wrap their heads around why so many people have invested so much in fundamentally changing how money works here in the 21st Century.
The co-host of the popular NPR podcast Planet Money provides a well-researched, entertaining, somewhat irreverent look at how money is a made-up thing that has evolved over time to suit humanity's changing needs.
Money only works because we all agree to believe in it. In Money, Jacob Goldstein shows how money is a useful fiction that has shaped societies for thousands of years, from the rise of coins in ancient Greece to the first stock market in Amsterdam to the emergence of shadow banking in the 21st century.
At the heart of the story are the fringe thinkers and world…
I’ve been fascinated by money since I was a graduate student when I had even less of it than I do today (as a British historian in the CUNY system). We all carry it in our wallets and have more or less of it in the bank, but it’s also in the air we breathe, suffusing the books we read and the decisions we make. So when I started researching and writing about the British past, money and its associated institutions seemed like an obvious place to start looking. It has yet to let me down, enabling me to discover new things to say about politics, literature, and society.
I love the way this book makes the very old story of the French Revolution new and exciting by telling the parallel story of how so much of the turmoil of that period was etched onto the money that a succession of governments issued.
I learned so much, both from the shifting set of images on French money and the wonderful stories about how a confused populace used this money to the best of their ability, as their paper currency lost both the crowned heads that once adorned it and, in the process, much of its value. Spang ingeniously recounts the revolutionaries’ efforts to paper over a failing revolution with vacuous promises to pay.
Winner of the Louis Gottschalk Prize, American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies A Financial Times Best History Book of the Year A Choice Outstanding Academic Title of the Year
Rebecca L. Spang, who revolutionized our understanding of the restaurant, has written a new history of money. It uses one of the most infamous examples of monetary innovation, the assignats-a currency initially defined by French revolutionaries as "circulating land"-to demonstrate that money is as much a social and political mediator as it is an economic instrument. Following the assignats from creation to abandonment, Spang shows them to be subject to the same…
For my entire life, I have been on a quest to get to know God on a deeper and more spiritual level and to manifest my dreams into my living reality. I have been intrigued by manifestation since I was a young girl, and it has allowed me to help and teach others how they can manifest their dream lives as well. Now, I am a full-time author, living the life I created, and I read books to help me understand more about my craft and also how I can help others who are looking for guidance in their lives. I hope you enjoy the books on this list, as they have helped shape my life and my way of thinking in one way or another.
This book helped change my perspective around money. It also helped me create more money and allow it to flow into my life in abundance.
The principles, techniques, and modalities in the book have changed my life, and I now think differently about money, how it is created, and how I can attract it into my life.
This step-by-step guide to creating money and abundance was given to Sanaya and Duane by their guides, Orin and DaBen. These wise spirit teachers have successfully helped thousands of people to manifest prosperity, find their life's work, and fulfill their life purpose. This book is infused with Orin and DaBen's consciousness of abundance that is available to you as you read to increase your ability to create money and abundance.
You can see immediate results in your life when you learn to create abundance by following the spiritual laws of money and abundance. Section I, Creating Money, is a step-by-step…
Crypto’s rollercoaster journey has given rise to some of the most thrilling real-life tales of the last two decades. These tales teem with personal drama and reveal much larger truths: about our fractured global moment, about the ripple effects of well-intentioned technological systems, and about the massive divide between how we want society to function and how it actually does.
As much as some people wish it dead, crypto is not going away any time soon. Many of its followers have adopted a religious-like belief that it will transform humanity and bring unlimited wealth to its followers; others simply believe it to be a good investment. Their collective trust in these strange digital currencies means that crypto will continue to shape the world in unpredictable ways.
The journalist Nathaniel Popper starts at the beginning, telling the story of how Bitcoin emerged from message boards and was slowly but surely propelled forward by government-wary libertarians, computer science nerds, and opportunistic venture capitalists.
Popper persuasively articulates the many problems that Bitcoin solves across the world—and then reveals its extremely bumpy road toward adoption.
Shortlisted for the Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award
A New York Times technology and business reporter charts the dramatic rise of Bitcoin and the fascinating personalities who are striving to create a new global money for the Internet age.
Digital Gold is New York Times reporter Nathaniel Popper's brilliant and engrossing history of Bitcoin, the landmark digital money and financial technology that has spawned a global social movement.
The notion of a new currency, maintained by the computers of users around the world, has been the butt of many jokes, but that has not stopped…
