The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel

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 Housel shares 19 short stories exploring the strange ways people think about money and teaches you how to make better sense of one of life’s most important topics.

This book is Nassim Taleb crossed with Bogleheads.

I couldn't put this book down. I have read countless books on money in my life (it was necessary to learn how I could retire at 30) and at this point most money books bore me, but this is not one of those books.

Housel explains monetary concepts in a fascinatingly concise and simple way - some with examples that I've never heard before, such as explaining compound interest with an analogy of how ice ages come to be.

If you're looking for a quick, interesting and fresh take on money I can't recommend this book enough.

This book was incredible. Short chapters but each packed with concise well-written statements that distilled important concepts into something you can immediately grasp. I don't love reading about finance, but I do love psychology, and the marriage of these two angles was done incredibly well.

It also helps that I have the exact same goals/expectations and financial strategy as the author, because I know we're coming from the same place (an extremely important idea he covers in Chapter 16). It's only the last chapter where he gives an overview of what he does personally; the rest of the book is a primer on larger principles.

Do NOT skip the Postscript on US history. In a few pages he summarizes why we ended up here in the most succinct way. That section alone should be required reading.

TLDR; don't read this book for specific investment advice. Do read it to absorb core principles that will help you make better decisions about your finances, and potentially much more.

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Gratuitous mashup example: this feels like taking Jon Kabat-Zinn's Wherever You Go There You Are, Daniel Kahneman's Thinking Fast & Slow, Ray Dalio's Principles and some Seth Godin, then mashing them into a single book about financial decision making. A great book to read a chapter or two out of often. It feels like a series of blog posts that became a book, but in the best possible way.