These personal finance books will make you rich. Maybe not today or tomorrow, but you will get rich over time and have a richer relationship with money.
Literally, trillions of dollars have been made because of the recommendations in these books.
There are millions of bestsellers written over the past 70 years. Reading just one or all of them is an exceptionally good use of your time.
Must-Read Books on Personal Finance
If you just read a few of the books listed below, your future life earnings will likely be hundreds of thousands, if not millions of more dollars higher than if you didn’t. The recommendations in these books are that good. Spend 2-4 hours of reading per book, or 5-8 hours listening to one and the ROI of that time will compound exponentially.
I’m super busyI try to read or listen to 4-5new money books every month. I try to mix it up – reading both new and classic books on saving, wealth building, investing, and real estate investing.
I can cruise through most books in an hour or two – hitting the intro, reading the first 2 chapters, and then picking the other chapters that I find more relevant to me.
When I travel and walk the dog, I listen to Audible – so I keep learning while I’m moving around. Audiobooks are actually incredible and you even learn unconsciously when you aren’t paying close attention. Audiobooks make you smarter.
About 20% of the time I read the whole book and about 2% of the time I can’t put the book down.
7 Best Money Personal Finance Books for Millennials
Over the past 5 years I’veread or listened to over 250 books on money and here are my all-time top 7 books on saving, wealth building, investing, and real estate investing. All of them changed my life.
- Financial Freedom: A Proven Path to All The Money You Will Ever Need
- Your Money or Your Life: 9 Steps to Transforming Your Relationship with Money and Achieving Financial Independence
- The Millionaire Next Door: The Surprising Secrets of America’s Wealthy
- The Only Investment Guide You’ll Ever Need
- The Bogleheads’ Guide to Investing
- The Intelligent Investor: The Definitive Book on Value Investing. A Book of Practical Counsel
- The Millionaire Real Estate Investor
1. Financial Freedom: A Proven Path to All The Money You Will Ever Need by Grant Sabatier
Yes, this is my book. After reading over 400 books on money I wrote Financial Freedom: A Proven Path To All The Money You Will Ever Need because there is only so much you can put in a blog post.
This is everything I learned and used to go from $2.26 in my bank account to a millionaire in 5 years. While it’s written by a millennial for millennials, readers of all ages from all around the world have gotten value from it.
What would you do tomorrow if you didn’t have to work for money? You don’t have to have millions of dollars in the bank to experience more freedom and have more time in your life for the things you love. How much money do you need? It’s likely a lot less than you think.
Money is infinite, but time is not. Become financially independent as fast as possible.
It’s an equal mixture of personal finance, investing, entrepreneurship, and life strategies. While the book is about how to reach financial independence as quickly as possible, it’s also about how to make more money in less time, and a lot more than that. I put my everything into this book and I’m confident you will get value from it.
2. Your Money or Your Life: 9 Steps to Transforming Your Relationship with Money and Achieving Financial Independence: Revised and Updated for the 21st Century by Vicki Robin
This book is legit – not just a book with a catchy title. If you read just one book on this list read “Your Money or Your Life” – especially if you have problems saving money. Most of your savings problems have to do with your relationship with money and can be easily fixed. This book in 9 simple steps shares how you can fix them.
It was written by personal finance pioneers Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin and has been updated multiple times over the years. Some of the highlights include the opening discussionon how we allare placing avalue on our life energy (time) for money.
This book will help you re-examine your job, your priorities,and how you think about money. It will also help you establish the precise habits that are essential to building wealth.
3. The Millionaire Next Door: The Surprising Secrets of America’s Wealthy by Thomas Stanley & William Danko
I first read “The Millionaire Next Door” when I was 12 years old. Seriously. It was on my parent’s bookshelf and when I first started dreaming about becoming a millionaire millennial. You could also say it started my fascination with money and personal finance.
I was blown away to learn that most millionaires are the people that you don’t expect – they are more likely to live in modest houses and drive old cars.
The reason that they are millionaires is that they saved, invested, and live below their means. This book analyzes habits of millionaires so you can learn how to build them too. This book taught me a lot and I recently re-read it again almost 20 years later and it was even better than I remembered.
It has a lot of practical tips that you can start using immediately and will impact the rest of your life.
4. The Only Investment Guide You’ll Ever Need by Andrew Tobias
Everyone should read “The Only Investment Guide You’ll Ever Need” – especially anyone in their 20’s or 30’s. This is the only book I have ever completed and then immediately started from the beginning and read it again. It’s that good.
I needed to read it twice because it is packed with so much great advice and I felt like I missed half of it reading the first time.
Author Andrew Tobias set out to write the only investment guide you’ll ever need and he did it. I have since bought copies and given them to tons of people who ask me “how can I make smarter money decisions”.
Although it was originally written 30 years it gets updated every 3 or 4 years to include up-to-date information – new website, tools, recommendations etc. It teaches you about everything you need to know about investing and making smart money decisions – saving, investing, insurance, taxes, how to save money shopping, and tons of other topics.
The advice is practical and all of author Andrew Tobias’ ideas are valuable. He’s also super funny which makes the book easy to read – not like stupid funny, I literally laughed out loud more than few times.
5. The Bogleheads’ Guide to Investingby Taylor Larimor, Mel Lindauer, and Michael LeBoeuf
Most investing books are boring – this one isn’t and it’s full of tons of data-based advice. If you read one book on investing read “The Bogleheads’ Guide to Investing“. This is especially true of millennials – since we are young enough to truly harvest the gains and power of compound interest.
The Bogleheads are a large group that follow the investment advice of Vanguard founder Jack Bogle – the pioneer of index fund investing. The foundation of the Boglehead strategy is instead of buying individual stocks – buy a small piece of every stock in the stock market.
That way you make money when the stock market goes up over time – and it almost always goes up over any 1o year period.Long term it is nearly impossible for any individual stock picker to consistently beat the market so investing in the entire stock market allows your money to grow as the market grows.
I personally put quite a bit of my long-term investment capital into index funds. This book explains the power of index funds and makes a compelling case for an investment strategy that is both practical and will make you money over time.
6. The Intelligent Investor: The Definitive Book on Value Investing. A Book of Practical Counsel (Revised Edition) by Benjamin Graham
This book is a monster (649 pages), but if you want to invest in individual stocks then you need to read “The Intelligent Investor“. It is widely regarded as the best book on stock investing ever written and is the book that most influenced Warren Buffett and generations of successful value-based stock investors.
It’s also an easy-to-read book that pretty much teaches you all of the fundamentals of stock investing. The real highlights how author Benjamin Graham shares his simple framework for evaluating the value of any stock and helps you decide whether you should buy it.
The idea is pretty simple but profound – when you are investing in a stock you are actually investing in a small piece of a business and you should plan to invest in the business for a long time.
In order to maximize your chance of earning money, you need to try and understand the core elements of a business – what they sell, who they compete with, and what they have that gives them a competitive advantage.
You also need to analyze their P/E (price-to-earnings ratio) and look for good values – low P/E ratios, strong fundamentals, and strong future profit opportunities. Finally, the goal of stock investing is to never lose money, and following Benjamin Graham’s advice will decrease the chance that you will lose money.
Originally written in the 1940s and updated regularly, The Intelligent Investor has made me a better and much more profitable individual investor.
7. The Millionaire Real Estate Investor
Buying my condo four years agois the best financial decision I have made so far in my short investing life. It has increased over 70% in value over that time period and is the biggest driver of the net-worth growth. I’m hooked.
I believe there is a lot of money to be made in real estate if you buy good deals and this book teaches you how to find them. Written by one of the most successful realtors ever (Keller Williams founder Gary Keller), “The Millionaire Real Estate Investor” is an easy read with a ton of great tips for evaluating and buying properties.
This is by far the best book I have ever read on real estate investing. If you are planning to buy a house, condo, or investment property in the near future then you need to read this book. It isspecifically written for new real estate investors and will help you learn the foundations for building and growing a profitable real estate portfolio.
I personally liked how the author profiles a wide variety of successful real estate investors (from 20-something to 50-year-old single moms) who all started small and built massive wealth from their real estate portfolios. The Millionaire Real Estate Investor is a practical, useful, and inspirational book. It teaches you how to make big real estate money.
Other Top Personal Finance Books
The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich by Timothy Ferriss
If you want to be an entrepreneur read this book! Tim Ferriss the author of “The 4 Hour Workweek” has single-handedly launched the live anywhere digital nomad lifestyle. He’s the guru and this is the book that started it all.
This is a must for any Millennial – it’s written for us and will help you live a freer lifestyle. He covers many topics but at the core, this is the guide for becoming a 21st-century digital entrepreneur where you make in the automated cloud.
Tim lays out how he built a more efficient lifestyle so he could run a high-income generating drop ship automated business. He made millions of dollars and then wrote this book that made him millions more. Tim Ferris is a generational pioneer and you should listen to him.
This is a great choice for an audiobook – it’s got a lot of great energy. Learn how to build an online business from one of the field’s masters.
The Automatic Millionaire by David Bach
In this absolutely groundbreaking finance book, The Automatic Millionaire, David Bach outlines a simple strategy that anyone can follow to automate most of their financial life. When it comes to managing our finances we are often our own worst enemies, but it’s never been easier to use technology to do the heavy lifting with your money, saving you both time AND making you more money because you’ll always be investing.
A vast majority of your money life you can essentially put on auto-pilot, which is what Automatic Millionaire shows you exactly how to do. While I personally used and believe that a hybrid automated and manual approach is the best investing strategy, everyone should first set up their “set it and forget it” automated foundation so you can easily save money without thinking about it.
Since this book was released, many 401(k) plans now automatically enroll you and make a certain contribution. Largely driven by the work of Nobel Prize Winning Economist Richard Thaler, automation is even more available than it was when David wrote Automatic Millionaire, making it even easier to automate your financial life.
Automatic Millionaire is hands down one of the best personal finance books. There’s a reason it’s sold upwards of 2 million copies.
The Simple Path to Wealth by J.L. Collins
As one of the best FIRE (financial independence retire early) books, the Simple Path to Wealth by J.L. Collins does not disappoint. While this is more of an investing strategy than a complete personal finance book, it fits well when read with Your Money or Your Life.
The book is largely based on the stock investing series that J.L. Collins offers on his website and is focused almost exclusively on index fund investing. But there’s also a no-nonsense breakdown of how to adjust your investing strategy based on where you are in your career, including how to invest when you’re accumulating versus withdrawing money.
What I like most about the book is how he outlines the investing strategy in three distinct phases, focusing on your accumulation phase (when you are making money), growth phase (when you are growing money), and deployment phase (when you are using the money to live on).
If you are looking for a simple and sound investing book then definitely check out The Simple Path to Wealth by J.L. Collins.
I Will Teach You To Be Rich by Ramit Sethi
I Will Teach You To Be Rich is arguably the best personal finance book written in the past 10 years and a second edition of the book was just released. I first read the book a year into my financial independence journey at the age of 25 and immediately started using some of his tips to negotiate more money from my clients.
Ramit can largely be described as the “Tim Ferriss of money” and his accessible writing style, as well as simple and actionable tips in I Will Teach You To Be Rich are largely focused on making more money. There’s a limit to how much you can cut back, but not a limit to how much money you can make.
What I like best about Ramit’s book is that it helped me shift my mindset from scarcity to abundance. I used to always save every single penny and manage every tiny aspect of my money very closely, but Ramit helped me realize that money is the only tool and it’s worth spending on what you enjoy and saving on what you don’t.
If you really want a Tesla, then save up and buy one. Life is short and money should be enjoyed, not just saved. This was a big shift for me and I definitely recommend you check out I Will Teach You To be Rich.
Use These Personal Finance Books to Take Action
In addition to reading these books, you should also start tracking your finances for free (ASAP!)
What’s the best money book you’ve read?
