5 Finance Books That Aren't Boring

Want to increase your financial knowledge and empower yourself to make better money decisions? Whether your starting a 401k, working for yourself, or just want to get a better grasp on tax filing, there are a lot of resources out there to use to further your personal finance education… but there’s one small problem: A lot of what you can read about money is downright boring.

When the material is boring, it’s hard to engage with it, it’s even tougher to remember it, and it’s almost impossible to implement it in your real life. On the flipside, however, you can also find a lot of finance books that are fun to read, but almost completely devoid of strong, actionable, serious advice that you can use to move the needle with your finances!

Are there any good books that sit in the middle ground of these two extremes? The good news is that there are, and we’re here to give you 5 books to check out that are both engaging and can actually teach you a thing or two about finance.

Broke Millennial by Erin Lowry

Erin Lowry started a personal finance blog back in the early twenty-teens as a creative outlet. Her blog, which she named Broke Millennial, served as a place to share personal stories about financial lessons taught by family members — as well as personal advice on managing money well based on her own experience from getting by on a small income in NYC.

After years of success, accolades, and growing popularity among 20- and 30-something readers looking to get their money right, Lowry went from blogger to published author with her first book, Broke Millennial: Stop Scraping By and Get Your Financial Life Together. 

Lowry takes a no-nonsense but also no-judgment approach to helping her fellow millennials figure out finance and make the best money moves so they can go from struggling to survive to truly thriving. Broke Millennial is the book for you if you want serious financial advice presented in an accessible, conversational way.

I Will Teach You To Be Rich by Ramit Sethi

Tired of being told to cut your daily latte? Ready to hear more financial advice beyond, “hey, you should save more”? 

Then I Will Teach You To Be Rich might be right up your alley. Ramit Sethi does take the time to explain the importance of saving (and investing), but he goes much farther than other financial gurus to explore the other side of the coin: earning more.

Sethi talks about how to negotiate for a higher salary, how to better manage your cash flow once you have more money coming in the door, and what you need to think about when choosing investments and accounts to grow your wealth. He also stresses the importance of building an entire system around your money to maximize how much you get from it.

This is an essential read for anyone who wants to recognize their earning potential and understand how to meet it.

The Geometry of Wealth by Brian Portnoy

Most finance books focus on the numbers… and only the numbers. But we don’t live our lives within spreadsheets, and there’s more to money than just adding and subtracting dollars and cents.

Brian Portnoy connects the financial reality of planning around your money and investing wisely with the much more intangible ways it impacts us and how we feel about it. With The Geometry of Wealth: How To Shape A Life Of Money And Meaning, Portnoy explains why the real definition of financial success should be “funded contentment,” what that means in practice, and how we can all achieve it.

Portnoy’s book will help educate you on the process and steps required to achieve your goals and grow wealth; to some extent, that’s the job of any great finance book. But the process laid out in The Geometry of Wealth is different in that it shows you how to become rich without getting stuck on the treadmill where “wanting more” becomes feeling like you never have enough. 

With this advice, you can craft a financial plan that actually includes meaning, purpose, and satisfaction, rather than just chasing more money for the sake of having more money.

The Random Walk Guide To Investing by Burton G. Malkiel

Investing books tend to be dense and dull — and unless you harbor a strong passion for learning about financial markets, books like A Random Walk Down Wall Street might fall into the “boring finance books” category. If so, skip it and go straight to its little cousin: The Random Walk Guide to Investing: 10 Rules to Financial Success.

Burton G. Malkiel wrote both books, but The Random Walk Guide to Investing is like a distilled, slimmed-down version of his most famous work that gets into much more detail about how markets work. This is a great, accessible read to give you a firm foundation for understanding how to manage your own money and get started investing if you haven’t already.

Your Money or Your Life by Vicki Robin

If you’ve ever stopped and thought to yourself, “what is the point of all this?” and “this” being working so hard to acquire stuff you don’t need to impress people you don’t like that much, then this might be the book for you.

Vicki Robin challenges us all to question our assumptions about how most of us spend the majority of our time (slaving away at jobs) and why we’re doing it (is buying more stuff really that important to you?). Your Money or Your Life: 9 Steps to Transforming Your Relationship with Money and Achieving Financial Independence has the potential to be a life-changing read — but at the very least, will probably offer you some unique perspectives you hadn’t considered before.

You don’t have to make extreme, drastic changes to your lifestyle or quit your job tomorrow. But Robin suggests good reasons we should consider cutting back on how much we’re spending on material things, increasing how much we save for our long-term financial freedom, and why we should carefully consider what’s most important to us so we can align our money with our values.

Love books?

Kali Roberge is a personal finance writer who contributes to JUGs to explain how freelancers and entrepreneurs can make the most of their money, and writes about mindful living through intentional spending through her email series, LETTERS. You can find her @KaliRoberge





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