It is becoming a tradition to share my favorite personal finance books each year and I love to do it. So many great financial minds are sharing their insights and narrowing it down to only five is a challenge. But, here are my favorite personal finance books I recommend you read in 2023:
Cashing Out: Win the Wealth Game by Walking Away by Julien and Kiersten Saunders
While many personal finance books try to speak to everyone, this book makes it clear that it is speaking specifically to the Black community and that alone is powerful. Julien and Kiersten offer a roadmap to financial freedom that navigates around the broken system and out of the machine that is corporate America.
The messages and advice in this book are great and I think it’s a must-read.
Tipped: The Life Changing Guide to Financial Freedom For Waitresses, Bartenders, Strippers, and All Other Service Industry Professionals by Barbara Sloan
Service industry employees are left out of the most common paths to wealth building and are often left out of the financial conversations all together. This book caters to those who don’t get a regular paycheck, a 401(k), and access to the same resources as everyone else and gives them what they need to start saving, budgeting, investing and overall planning for their futures.
I think this book has been needed for a long time and I applaud Barbara for writing it!
Launching Financial Grownups: Live Your Richest Life by Helping Your (Almost) Adult Kids Become Everyday Money Smart by Bobbi Rebell
As a parent and a financial advisor, I know how important is and how difficult it can be to get kids excited about money (in more ways than just spending it).
This book is a great tool for parents who want to support their kids without sinking their own retirement plans, with conversations around the realistic challenges that young adults face: credit card debt, financial peer pressure, managing a household, and more.
Retire Before Mom & Dad: The Simple Numbers Behind a Lifetime of Financial Freedom by Rob Berger
This isn’t a new book (it was released in 2019) but it’s an important one. For anyone hoping to FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early), this book is a guide to help you get there.
The book covers some of the basics—spending habits, FIRE math, investing—but what I really love is the “Life Experiments” that can help you kick bad money habits and gain good ones.
Keys to Financial Confidence: Unlock Your Best Life by Marika Stimac
This book includes 40 short, digestible chapters, each of which includes coaching questions which are designed to get you thinking about personal finances and key action steps to arm you with tools and techniques to feel more confident in your decision-making.
You can read a chapter a week and will actually have time to answer the questions and complete the steps to move forward.
***BONUS*** Don’t Retire… Graduate!: Building a Path to Financial Freedom and Retirement at Any Age by Eric Brotman, CFP®
You knew it was coming. I include my book here not because I hope to retire on the royalties (anyone who has written a book can tell you that’s not likely), but because I truly believe it is one of the most powerful tools on the market.
Especially for readers in their 20s and 30s who are just starting out, this book can guide you through all the steps that I would share with a client during a lifelong advisory relationship.
It has activities and worksheets for getting out of debt, creating a budget, calculating your net worth, making sure you’re properly insured, creating a living will, structuring your portfolio, and everything else you need to do to be on track for retirement.
It may seem counterintuitive to publish this because for $16 you can do for yourself what our advisors are paid to do for our clients. But I know that not everyone is in the position to hire a financial advisor and want the necessary tools to be available to those individuals.