Whether you are a seasoned money pro, or just starting out on your financial independence journey, here is a list of books that will keep you on the path to financial wellbeing, motivate you to grow that green stuff and keep more of it! These books are listed in no particular order as I find them ALL helpful in different ways. Click each title or image below to purchase on Amazon.
1. Rich Dad Poor Dad
Author: Robert T. Kiyosaki
“What the Rich Teach Their Kids About Money That the Poor and Middle Class Do Not!” This classic book really pounds home the fact that rich people buy assets and poor people purchase liabilities. This book covers the importance of financial literacy, real estate and stock investing, assets vs. liabilities, starting your own business, cashflow and overall wealth building for financial independence.
2. The Millionaire Next Door
Author: Thomas J. Stanley and William D. Danko
The bestselling The Millionaire Next Door identifies seven common traits that show up again and again among those who have accumulated wealth. Most of the truly wealthy in this country don’t live in Beverly Hills or on Park Avenue-they live next door. Learn the secrets and habits of Americas wealthy so you don’t fall victim to “keeping up with the Jones'”
3. I will Teach You to be Rich
Author: Ramit Sethi
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 program that just works.
4. The Richest Man in Babylon
Author: George S. Clason
“As a young man, I came across George Samuel Clason’s classic book The Richest Man in Babylon, which offered commonsense financial advice told through ancient parables. I recommend it to everyone.“
–Tony Robbins, Money: Master the Game
The ancient Babylonians were the first people to discover the universal laws of prosperity. In his classic bestseller, “The Richest Man in Babylon,” George S. Clason reveals their secrets for creating, growing, and preserving wealth. Through these entertaining tales of merchants, tradesmen, and herdsmen, you’ll learn how to keep more out what you earn; get out of debt; put your money to work; attract good luck; choose wise investments; and safeguard a lasting fortune.
5. Money, Master the Game: 7 Simple Steps to Financial Freedom
Author: Tony Robbins
Tony Robbins has coached and inspired more than 50 million people from over 100 countries. More than four million people have attended his live events. Oprah Winfrey calls him “super-human”. Now for the first time – in his first book in two decades – he’s turned to the topic that vexes us all: How to secure financial freedom for ourselves and our families.
Based on extensive research and one-on-one interviews with more than 50 of the most legendary financial experts in the world – from Carl Icahn and Warren Buffett, to Ray Dalio and Steve Forbes – Tony Robbins has created a simple seven-step blueprint that anyone can use for financial freedom.
Robbins has a brilliant way of using metaphor and story to illustrate even the most complex financial concepts – making them simple and actionable. With expert advice on our most important financial decisions, Robbins is an advocate for the listener, dispelling the myths that often rob people of their financial dreams.
Tony Robbins walks listeners of every income level through the steps to become financially free by creating a lifetime income plan. This book delivers invaluable information and essential practices for getting your financial house in order.
6. The Science of Getting Rich
Author: Wallace D. Wattles
As featured in the bestselling book The Secret, here is the landmark guide to wealth creation republished with the classic essay “How to Get What You Want.”Wallace D. Wattles spent a lifetime considering the laws of success as he found them in the work of the world’s great philosophers. He then turned his life effort into this simple, slender book – a volume that he vowed could replace libraries of philosophy, spirituality, and self-help for the purpose of attaining one definite goal: a life of prosperity.Wattles describes a definite science of wealth attraction, built on the foundation of one commanding idea: “There is a thinking stuff from which all things are made…A thought, in this substance, produces the thing that is imaged by the thought.”In his seventeen short, straight-to-the-point chapters, Wattles shows how to use this idea, how to overcome barriers to its application, and how work with very direct methods that awaken it in your life. He further explains how creation and not competition is the hidden key to wealth attraction, and how your power to get rich uplifts everyone around you.The Science of Getting Richconcludes with Wattle’s rare essay “How to Get Want You Want” – a brilliant refresher of his laws of wealth creation.
7. Your Money or Your Life
Author: Vicki Robin and Joe Domingues
For more than twenty-five years, Your Money or Your Life has been considered the go-to book fortaking back your life by changing your relationship with money. Hundreds of thousands of people have followed this nine-step program, learning to live more deliberately and meaningfully with Vicki Robin’s guidance. This fully revised and updated edition with a foreword by “the Frugal Guru” (New Yorker) Mr. Money Mustache is the ultimate makeover of this bestselling classic, ensuring that its time-tested wisdom applies to people of all ages and covers modern topics like investing in index funds, managing revenue streams like side hustles and freelancing, tracking your finances online, and having difficult conversations about money.
Whether you’re just beginning your financial life or heading towards retirement, this book will show you how to:
• Get out of debt and develop savings
• Save money through mindfulness and good habits, rather than strict budgeting
• Declutter your life and live well for less
• Invest your savings and begin creating wealth
• Save the planet while saving money
• …and so much more!
8. Think and Grow Rich
Author: Napoleon Hill
This book has been called the “Granddaddy of All Motivational Literature.” It was the first book to boldly ask, “What makes a winner?” The man who asked and listened for the answer, Napoleon Hill, is now counted in the top ranks of the world’s winners himself.
The most famous of all teachers of success spent “a fortune and the better part of a lifetime of effort” to produce the “Law of Success” philosophy that forms the basis of his books and that is so powerfully summarized in this one.
In the original Think and Grow Rich, published in 1937, Hill draws on stories of Andrew Carnegie, Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, and other millionaires of his generation to illustrate his principles. In the updated version, Arthur R. Pell, Ph.D., a nationally known author, lecturer, and consultant in human resources management and an expert in applying Hill’s thought, deftly interweaves anecdotes of how contemporary millionaires and billionaires, such as Bill Gates, Mary Kay Ash, Dave Thomas, and Sir John Templeton, achieved their wealth. Outmoded or arcane terminology and examples are faithfully refreshed to preclude any stumbling blocks to a new generation of readers.
9. You are a Badass at Making Money
Author: Jen Sincero
You Are a Badass at Making Money will launch you past the fears and stumbling blocks that have kept financial success beyond your reach. 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 channels the inimitable sass and practicality that made You Are a Badass an indomitable bestseller. She combines hilarious personal essays with bite-size, aha concepts that unlock earning potential and get real results.
Learn to:
• Uncover what’s holding you back from making money
• Give your doubts, fears, and excuses the heave-ho
• Relate to money in a new (and lucrative) way
• Shake up the cocktail of creation
• Tap into your natural ability to grow rich
• Shape your reality—stop playing victim to circumstance
• Get as wealthy as you wanna be
“This book truly crystallizes the concept that financial abundance is an inside job—in that it all begins with your mindset—and Sincero gets serious (in the funniest ways possible) about helping you identify your particular limiting beliefs surrounding money.”
—PopSugar
10. Quit Like a Millionaire
Author: Kristy Shen and Bryce Leung
From two leaders of the FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early) movement, a bold, contrarian guide to retiring at any age, with a reproducible formula to financial independence
A bull***t-free guide to growing your wealth, retiring early, and living life on your own terms
Kristy Shen retired with a million dollars at the age of thirty-one, and she did it without hitting a home run on the stock market, starting the next Snapchat in her garage, or investing in hot real estate. Learn how to cut down on spending without decreasing your quality of life, build a million-dollar portfolio, fortify your investments to survive bear markets and black-swan events, and use the 4 percent rule and the Yield Shield–so you can quit the rat race forever. Not everyone can become an entrepreneur or a real estate baron; the rest of us need Shen’s mathematically proven approach to retire decades before sixty-five.
11. A Random Walk Down Wall Street
Author: Burton G. Malkiel
With the prevailing wisdom changing on an almost daily basis, Burton G. Malkiel’s reassuring and vastly informative volume remains the best investment guide money can buy.
In a time of increasing inequality, when high-frequency traders and hedge-fund managers seem to tower over the average investor, Burton G. Malkiel’s classic and gimmick-free investment guide is now more necessary than ever. Rather than tricks, what you’ll find here is a time-tested and thoroughly research-based strategy for your portfolio. Whether you’re considering your first 401k contribution or contemplating retirement, this fully-updated edition of A Random Walk Down Wall Street should be the first book on your reading list.
In A Random Walk Down Wall Street you’ll learn the basic terminology of “the Street” and how to navigate it with the help of a user-friendly, long-range investment strategy that really works. Drawing on his own varied experience as an economist, financial adviser, and successful investor, Malkiel shows why an individual who buys over time and holds a low-cost, internationally diversified index of securities is still likely to exceed the performance of portfolios carefully picked by professionals using sophisticated analytical techniques. In this new edition, Malkiel provides a brand-new section on the recent bubble in cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, as well as valuable new material on “tax-loss harvesting”―the crown jewel of tax management. He also presents a critical analysis of two recently popular investment-management techniques: factor investing and risk parity.
On top of all this, the book’s classic lifecycle guide to investing, which tailors strategies to investors of any age, will help you plan confidently for the future. You’ll learn how to analyze the potential returns, not only for basic stocks and bonds but for the full range of investment opportunities―from money market accounts and real estate investment trusts to insurance, home ownership, and tangible assets like gold and collectibles. Individual investors of every level of experience and risk tolerance will find throughout the book the critical facts and step-by-step guidance they need to protect and grow their hard-earned dollars.
12. The 4-Hour Workweek
Author: Timothy Ferriss
Forget the old concept of retirement and the rest of the deferred-life plan–there is no need to wait and every reason not to, especially in unpredictable economic times. Whether your dream is escaping the rat race, experiencing high-end world travel, or earning a monthly five-figure income with zero management, The 4-Hour Workweek is the blueprint.
This step-by-step guide to luxury lifestyle design teaches:
• How Tim went from $40,000 per year and 80 hours per week to $40,000 per month and 4 hours per week
• How to outsource your life to overseas virtual assistants for $5 per hour and do whatever you want
• How blue-chip escape artists travel the world without quitting their jobs
• How to eliminate 50% of your work in 48 hours using the principles of a forgotten Italian economist
• How to trade a long-haul career for short work bursts and frequent “mini-retirements”
13. You Can Retire Sooner Than You Think
Author: Wes Moss
If you think you need to win the lottery or work until you’re 75 to retire with financial stability, Money Matters host Wes Moss has very good news for you. You Can Retire Sooner Than You Think reveals the secrets for ensuring a successful retirement―sooner rather than later.
After conducting an intensive study of happy retirees to learn the financial practices they hold in common, Moss discovered that it doesn’t take financial genius, millions of dollars, or sophisticated investment skills to ensure a safe, solid retirement. All it takes is five best practices:
- Determine what you want and need your retirement money for
- Figure out how much you need to save
- Create a plan to pay off your mortgage in as little as five years
- Develop an income stream from multiple sources
- Become an income investor
Getting on the fast track to a great retirement is a lot simpler than the retirement professionals would have you believe. You Can Retire Sooner Than You Think provides the proven-effective, five-step formula for creating the retirement of your dreams.
14. The Financial Diet
Author: Chelsea Fagan
How to get good with money, even if you have no idea where to start.
The Financial Diet is the personal finance book for people who don’t care about personal finance. Whether you’re in need of an overspending detox, buried under student debt, or just trying to figure out how to live on an entry-level salary, The Financial Diet gives you tools to make a budget, understand investments, and deal with your credit. Chelsea Fagan has tapped a range of experts to help you make the best choices for you, but she also knows that being smarter with money isn’t just about what you put in the bank. It’s about everything―from the clothes you put in your closet, to your financial relationship habits, to the food you put in your kitchen (instead of ordering in again). So The Financial Diet gives you the tools to negotiate a raise and the perfect cocktail recipe to celebrate your new salary.
The Financial Diet will teach you:
• how to get good with money in a year.
• the ingredients everyone needs to have a budget-friendly kitchen.
• how to talk about awkward money stuff with your friends.
• the best way to make (and stick to!) a budget.
• how to take care of your house like a grown-up.
• what the hell it means to invest (and how you can do it).
15. Investing for Dummies
Author: Eric Tyson
In the world of investing, slow and steady wins the race. With this mantra in mind, trusted author and finance guru Eric Tyson is back with the latest edition of the #1 bestselling book, Investing For Dummies,to help you achieve your investment goals. Inside, he offers time-tested advice on how to develop a winning investment strategy that matches your abilities with your expectations — all the while ensuring you’re slowly and steadily growing your portfolio.
No matter where you are in your investment planning, the recommendations and strategies in this popular and easy-to-follow reference offer everything you need to ramp up your portfolio. From the tax laws that affect investing decisions to the impact of the current political environment, this foolproof guide covers it all and gives you the confidence to invest like the pros.
- Develop and manage your portfolio in any market
- Choose investments that match your goals
- Navigate the world of online investing and robo advisors
Whether you’re a millennial securing your first job, an employee rolling over a 401(k), a baby boomer looking to shore up your nest egg prior to retirement — or anywhere in between — all the sound investment advice you need is at your fingertips!
16. Rich Habits: The Daily Success Habits of Wealthy Individuals
Author: Thomas C. Corley
The ”Rich Habits” are ten principles created through years of researching the daily success habits of his wealthiest clients. These ten simple principles miraculously transform every individual who comes into contact with them. By applying these principles, you are literally walking in the footsteps of the wealthy.
In Rich Habits, Tom Corley provides a step by step financial success program that is concise, easy to understand and even easier to apply, regardless of your age, education or income level. In these tough economic times, individuals are struggling financially and desperately looking for help in achieving financial success. Every person seeks prosperity for themselves and their families, and with Rich Habitsthe secret to financial success possessed by only the wealthiest individuals, will be revealed. Join the Rich Habits financial success revolution.
17. The Automatic Millionaire
Author: David Bach
What’s the secret to becoming a millionaire?
For years people have asked David Bach, the national bestselling author of Smart Women Finish Rich, Smart Couples Finish Rich, and Start Late, Finish Rich what’s the real secret to getting rich? What’s the one thing I need to do? Now, in the newly revised The Automatic Millionaire, expanded and updated, David Bach is sharing that secret.
The Automatic Millionaire starts with the powerful story of an average American couple–he’s a low-level manager, she’s a beautician–whose joint income never exceeds $55,000 a year, yet who somehow manage to own two homes debt-free, put two kids through college, and retire at 55 with more than $1 million in savings. Through their story you’ll learn the surprising fact that you cannot get rich with a budget! You have to have a plan to pay yourself first that is totally automatic, a plan that will automatically secure your future and pay for your present.
What makes The Automatic Millionaire unique:
· You don’t need a budget
· You don’t need willpower
· You don’t need to make a lot of money
· You don’t need to be that interested in money
· You can set up the plan in an hour
David gives you a totally realistic system, based on timeless principles, with everything you need to know, including phone numbers, websites and apps, so you can put the secret to becoming an Automatic Millionaire in place from the comfort of your own home.
This powerful little book has the potential to secure your financial future. Do it once–the rest is automatic!
18. The Total Money Makeover
Author: Dave Ramsey
You CAN take control of your money. Build up your money muscles with America’s favorite finance coach.
Okay, folks, do you want to turn those fat and flabby expenses into a well-toned budget? Do you want to transform your sad and skinny little bank account into a bulked-up cash machine? Then get with the program, people. There’s one sure way to whip your finances into shape, and that’s with The Total Money Makeover: Classic Edition.
By now, you’ve heard all the nutty get-rich-quick schemes, the fiscal diet fads that leave you with a lot of kooky ideas but not a penny in your pocket. Hey, if you’re tired of the lies and sick of the false promises, take a look at this—it’s the simplest, most straightforward game plan for completely making over your money habits. And it’s based on results, not pie-in-the-sky fantasies. With The Total Money Makeover: Classic Edition, you’ll be able to:
- Design a sure-fire plan for paying off all debt—meaning cars, houses, everything
- Recognize the 10 most dangerous money myths (these will kill you)
- Secure a big, fat nest egg for emergencies and retirement!
19. The Simple Path to Wealth
Author: JL Collins
This book grew out of a series of letters between the author and his daughter concerning various things—mostly about money and investing—she was not yet quite ready to hear.
The simple approach he created for her and now all in this book, is not only easy to understand and implement, it is more powerful than any other.
Together you will explore:
- Debt: Why you must avoid it and what to do if you have it.
- The importance of having F-you Money.
- How to think about money, and the unique way understanding this is key to building your wealth.
- Where traditional investing advice goes wrong and what actually works.
- What the stock market really is and how it really works.
- Why the stock market always goes up and why most people still lose money investing in it.
- How to invest in a raging bull, or bear, market.
- Specific investments to implement these strategies.
- The Wealth Building and Wealth Preservation phases of your investing life and why they are not always tied to your age.
- How your asset allocation is tied to those phases and how to choose it.
- How to simplify the sometimes confusing world of 401(k), 403(b), TSP, IRA and Roth accounts.
- TRFs (Target Retirement Funds), HSAs (Health Savings Accounts) and RMDs (Required Minimum Distributions).
- What investment firm to use and why the one I recommend is so far superior to the competition.
- Why you should be very cautious when engaging an investment advisor and whether you need to at all.
- Why and how you can be conned, and how to avoid becoming prey.
- Why I don’t recommend dollar cost averaging.
- What financial independence looks like and how to have your money support you.
- What the 4% rule is and how to use it to safely spend your wealth.
- The truth behind Social Security.
- A Case Study on how this all can be implemented in real life.
20. Financial Freedom
Author: Grant Sabatier
Money is unlimited. Time is not. Become financially independent as fast as possible.
In 2010, 24-year old Grant Sabatier woke up to find he had $2.26 in his bank account. Five years later, he had a net worth of over $1.25 million, and CNBC began calling him “the Millennial Millionaire.” By age 30, he had reached financial independence. Along the way he uncovered that most of the accepted wisdom about money, work, and retirement is either incorrect, incomplete, or so old-school it’s obsolete.
Financial Freedom is a step-by-step path to make more money in less time, so you have more time for the things you love. It challenges the accepted narrative of spending decades working a traditional 9 to 5 job, pinching pennies, and finally earning the right to retirement at age 65, and instead offers readers an alternative: forget everything you’ve ever learned about money so that you can actually live the life you want.
Sabatier offers surprising, counter-intuitive advice on topics such as how to:
* Create profitable side hustles that you can turn into passive income streams or full-time businesses
* Save money without giving up what makes you happy
* Negotiate more out of your employer than you thought possible
* Travel the world for less
* Live for free–or better yet, make money on your living situation
* Create a simple, money-making portfolio that only needs minor adjustments
* Think creatively–there are so many ways to make money, but we don’t see them.
But most importantly, Sabatier highlights that, while one’s ability to make money is limitless, one’s time is not. There’s also a limit to how much you can save, but not to how much money you can make. No one should spend precious years working at a job they dislike or worrying about how to make ends meet. Perhaps the biggest surprise: You need less money to “retire” at age 30 than you do at age 65.
Financial Freedom is not merely a laundry list of advice to follow to get rich quick–it’s a practical roadmap to living life on one’s own terms, as soon as possible.
