Seven life-changing personal finance books to learn how to build wealth – by someone who’s actually read them
- Christopher White
- Feb 18
- 15 min read
For all the talk of having mid-life crises, I hadn’t spotted anything like that coming over the hill as I approached my 40th birthday in 2022. My 30th birthday had passed without incident, so I expected the next big milestone to do the same. There were no machinations of buying a flashy car, getting bleach blond hair extensions, or overindulging in things that might be bad for me. All good, I thought.
But as the big day came into view, I found myself thinking about the future in a way that I just hadn’t found important before. I was living less in a ‘screw it, I’ll probably be dead by 60’ kind of way, and more of a, ‘what if I’m not dead by 60,’ type mindset.
That meant much more anxiety around two things: whether I’d be stuck in a dead end job until I was firmly attached to a Zimmer frame, and whether it might be humanly possible to bring that retirement date forward.
I cringed when I found out that according to the DWP I’d only be able to stop working at the age of 68, especially as I’d seen deaths in my family at 61 (my uncle) and 64 (my mother).
I just started to feel overwhelmed by the thought that I might need to keep at the daily 9-5 grind for another 28 years. That seemed like an insurmountable and unfathomable amount of my life. What time would that give me to live properly - weekends and 6 weeks of annual leave every year?
It may sound silly, but I wanted to be able to enjoy living...whilst I am still alive.
How I started: completely uneducated about finance at the age of 40
I’m not sure how it started, but it may have something to do with me being in the most debt I’d ever experienced.
I’d bought my first flat by myself in 2019 for just £120,000, but had decided I wanted to put new heating in, and if I was going to do that, I might as well get the place replastered, and if that were the case, I should probably rip out the kitchen and bathroom and get new ones of those too. Fancy radiators? Of course.
And I hadn’t even thought about the costs of furnishings – or putting in a new driveway.
So under a crushing amount of personal debt that I just couldn’t seem to dig myself out of, and aware on the fringes of the rise of the side hustle culture, I felt like I needed to find a way out.
The more I thought about money, the more I realised that I just didn’t know enough about it. What even was money? How does it work? How do other people seem to get so much of it? And what was holding me back?
I’m not talking about making monthly budgets, which I’d already been doing (and failing at sticking to) for years. The one key concept I found myself lusting after is this: how to change my money mindset.
I knew I had to start educating myself about money, and turned to financial education books. These are some of the ones that really helped me, and maybe they will help you too.
The best personal finance books (in my experience):
Rich Dad, Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki
The very first book I stumbled upon was Rich Dad, Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki. Whatever your views on the man are (he is famously a big Trump supporter, and even co-wrote a wealth book with him), I found that he explained wealth in a really accessible way – even to someone who was already in their middle age.
The main takeaway I got from Rich Dad, Poor Dad, was about mindset as a concept: you either have a rich mindset, or a poor mindset. I realised I’d come from the latter, and had completely missed the point of money. I’d been all my life on the precipice, financially speaking, and never had any money in savings, or investments.
The key thing I found out from this book was to understand that the rich know the true purpose of money: to make more money. The poor mindset makes you think that if you have money, you need to spend it.
That’s basically the concept of buying or investing in assets versus spending money on liabilities – the former including stocks, shares, property, gold, businesses and other things that are likely to appreciate in value; the latter includes things like new cars, expensive holidays, impulse purchases on stuff you don’t need.
With a poor mindset, your money just flows into your bank account from your job, and out almost immediately on things that won’t make you any money. This was exactly how I was living my life.
That’s not to say that we shouldn’t be spending money on experiences – because you won’t necessarily remember your investments, but you will remember fondly that time you took your mother on holiday before she died.
Rich Dad, Poor Dad gave me a lightbulb moment, and I was hooked on finding other books that could teach me more.
Cashflow Quadrant by Robert Kiyosaki
No sooner had I read Rich Dad, Poor Dad, than I wanted to read it again, and again. I just couldn’t believe this huge secret had been in plain sight my whole life. But you can’t just read one book forever. So I picked up the next logical book in Kiyosaki’s repertoire, Cashflow Quadrant.
Despite the unimaginatively dry title, it’s a fantastic read. It’s a slightly more demanding book than the former, but essentially Kiyosaki goes on to explain more about the concept of wealth, and how different people fall into different categories.
To explain the concept of the book, picture a cross, dissected with a vertical and a horizontal line. If you simply have a ‘job’ with contracted hours and salary, you’re in the left hand ‘employee’ column, the least flexible, and with no options to leverage your time. You have an 'employee' mindset.
In the same column are self-employed people, who although aren’t forced to work by having a manager or employer, essentially still don’t have control over their time – they simply own a ‘job’. That means that when you stop working, the money stops too.
The goal is to get to a place where your money is working for you even when you sleep – you may have heard that quote before from one of the most famous investors the world has even seen, Warren Buffett.
The right hand column is that place. Here, you’ll find business owners, with an 'investor' mindset: people that employ other people (or have processes on automations, like a print on demand store for example). They can take a few weeks off, and their business will still be making them money.
It’s so simple really, but just requires that mindset – how often have you heard of people starting or buying businesses without any expertise in that field? They just know how to make money, and consult or employ the experts that they need.
For example, if you rented a business premises, set it up as a beauty salon, and rented out chairs or spaces in it, that would be a great example of how you’re now a business owner, with money coming in no matter what (ok, there are other issues there, like getting the marketing right, maintaining the facilities, and filling all of your chairs with beauticians).
Underneath that are investors. Kiyosaki talks mainly about business and property investors, choosing the right businesses or properties to invest in that will produce sustainable cashflow – hence the cashflow quadrant.
For the ‘mom and pop’ investors, that might include buying a little second property, renting or AirBnB’ing it out, to create additional income streams. In fact, ‘income streams’ was one of the many financial literacy phrases that I’d never heard of before starting my financial education journey – but it’s absolutely crucial to know all about.
I’d definitely suggest reading Cashflow Quadrant, but only after you’ve read Rich Dad, Poor Dad.
The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel
This book is one that I return to time and time again. I’m fascinated by it. It’s not about giving you tools to save money, but as the title suggests, it explores the money mindset. I was (and still am) on an absolute mission to change my money mindset and understand why I think about money the way I do – and how I can undo decades of negative reinforcement.
The book consists of 19 short stories, each illustrating key lessons about wealth, greed, and happiness.
Housel emphasises that managing money well isn’t about intelligence—it’s about psychology. Financial success depends on behaviour, discipline, and understanding personal motivations rather than market predictions or technical expertise.
One key takeaway for me was that money should be a tool to buy time and freedom, not just material possessions. I knew from Rich Dad, Poor Dad, that rich people use money to make more money, but Housel completes the picture here.
When I was asking ‘what do I want?’ I was really struggling to come up with anything other than ‘more money’. Who wouldn’t want that? I just didn’t know my ‘why’.
And this is it: I want more money because I want control of my time. I don’t want to have to log on to pointless work meetings at 9am, I want to be able to have the day off if it’s sunny. I want to be able to see my family, young or old, as they grow up, or before I can’t see them ever again.
There was also another really interesting distinction made by Housel: the difference between being rich, and being wealthy.
How would you answer the question, ‘do you want to be rich?’ Most of us would say, ‘absolutely!’ But Housel says that being rich is simply having money, or having a high income.
Often, those people who earns tonnes of money just don’t know how to manage it, and you see the same thing happen with lottery winners. One day they’ve won the Euromillions jackpot of £32m, and then five years later they’re in a Daily Express article about how they frittered it all away and had to go back to work and sell their collection of Ferraris to pay off their debt.
The real question is, ‘do you want to be wealthy?’ Because being wealthy means having financial independence and security, and knowing that you have your wealth invested in all the right places for your life goals.
As I said, I loved The Psychology of Money, and it’s 100% worth getting yourself a copy to read time and time again.
The Creature from Jekyll Island by G. Edward Griffin
I’m not sure how I stumbled across this book, but it turned out to be one of the most jaw-dropping books (let alone personal finance books) that I’d ever read. Just don't be put off by its fairly vintage cover design.
It’s essentially a story of how money works, how it was created, and why we have inflation (and how that works).
The bit about inflation was a lightbulb moment for me: I was outraged that the governments who say they look after us are keeping people in the dark with phrases like ‘quantitative easing’, ‘injection of cash’, 'bolstering the balance sheets', and others, making us feel like they are doing the right thing for the economy, and us.
It used to be that one US dollar was redeemable for a certain amount of gold. But with the decoupling of the dollar from the gold standard, it gave the US government the power to print more money as and when they wanted.
That means there is more currency in the market, and with more currency, the value of it all is decreased. This is why experts say that saving money is a bad idea, as interest rates don’t keep pace with inflation – so your money will be worth less no matter how much you save.
And that, my friends, is basically what inflation is. You can see why it’s such a useful piece of information to know. And you can also see why some people favour investing into alternative non-fiat forms of wealth like Crypto – there is a finite amount of Bitcoin in the world, so the value of that against fiat currency will only rise. Just don’t tell your financial advisor that, as very few of them believe in anything other than traditional money market products.
It’s why you see influencers on Instagram scare us all by saying that a house used to cost £63 back in 1940, and now the average house price is something like £350K. Inflation is thanks to governments printing as much money as they want.
The Creature from Jekyll Island was a fantastic, history-based read, and it’s a must if you want to fully educate yourself on the context in which we live, spend and invest today.
The Latte Factor by David Bach
This is a nice, enjoyable read which like Rich Dad, Poor Dad, explains finance and investing from a beginner’s perspective.
The story follows the story of a young woman who was trapped in her job (ring any bells?) and couldn’t see any way out (ding ding ding!)
What Bach explains through this story is that we don’t need to be rich in order to live rich.
We’ve all heard the Baby Boomers tell us that we buy too many avocados and pay too much for Netflix, and that’s why we can’t afford to buy a house. But at the heart of this quite problematic theory is something that makes sense, and Bach explores it.
It’s all about intentional spending. The idea is simple: small, unnecessary daily expenses—like a $5 latte, dining out, or impulse purchases—add up over time and can significantly impact long-term financial health.
That daily $5 latte, Bach argues, when you add up the cost each month ($150), and year ($1,800), could be foregone and instead invested in simple ETFs, or even in shares to create long term wealth, without noticing any difference in your day to day life.
And we know from any personal finance book that the one absolutely essential keystone of building wealth from investing is having a long (20+ years) timeframe. It’s only after year 25 of your investing that the major compound gains start happening. Just ask Warren Buffett, who has made something like 95% of his wealth after hitting his 60s!
I loved reading The Latte Factor, and sometimes give it another once over to remind myself of the basics.
Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill
Think and Grow Rich is one of those timeless books that thousands of people claim has changed their life. Is it the most easy going of reads? No. Could it be life-changing? Absolutely.
It was written in the early 1900s as a sort of commission by JD Rockefeller for Napoleon Hill, who spent something like 20 years researching it, interviewing successful, wealthy people, to find out what the secret of wealth is.
The answer is something akin to manifesting. That’s given away in the title: Think…and Grow Rich. Essentially, he writes about having a concrete idea and belief about what you absolutely must have in life, and then reinforcing that on a frequent basis, multiple times a day.
At the moment, I’m about to replace my car, which is now 16 years old. Do I need one? No. It still runs nicely, but I suppose I’m just getting a bit bored and want something more shiny (don’t tell any of the authors on this list!)
How is this related to Think and Grow Rich? I’ve had my new car purchase in my thoughts for months: looking at Autotrader, doing my research, figuring out how I’ll pay for it. And that’s essentially what Hill’s book of DIY manifestation involves.
You can’t just ask the cosmos for a new car, and expect one to turn up outside your house tomorrow. Instead, you focus intensively on what it is you want, and the universe (i.e. your own mind) will figure out how you’re going to get it. Not overnight, but over the course of a period of time.
And that’s the message of this book. It’s largely written in a repetitive format, to try and chip away at your old, rigid mindset – one that might sound something like this: ‘there’s no way I could ever get XYZ’ or ‘I don’t deserve to have money.’ So, it’s not magic, it’s just absolute determination to get what it is that you desire, and being crystal clear on that goal.
I’d definitely recommend buying Think and Grow Rich, but you need to keep reading it again and again to get its full benefits – and you need to be ok with reading text written in a style made popular over 100 years ago!
I Will Teach You To Be Rich by Ramit Sethi
You may have seen Ramit Sethi on his Netflix show, where he casually drops into people’s lives to solve their money problems. His book is a modern blend of mindset education, and giving readers tools to manage their money properly.
That all stems from creating a strong financial foundation: setting up automated bills, savings accounts, avoiding unnecessary fees. He then moves on to crushing any personal debt you have, paying it off aggressively.
The next bit is about investing. I must admit to not knowing anything about investing in the stock market – it had always sounded so scarily risky, and I was an impressionable young boy when the Barings Bank fiasco happened in the early 90s – so you can see why I had a lot of trepidation about putting money somewhere that I might never get it back.
Sethi busts these myths, and talks about making it super simple. Instead of picking single stocks, which nobody can ever predict, it’s about investing regularly (dollar cost averaging) into solid ETFs (exchange traded funds) like VUSA (VOO) from Vanguard, or other total stock market indexes.
The most interesting aspect of Sethi’s book was that he focuses on helping people explore how they can live their ‘rich’ life. You may think you need ten gazillion dollars to be happy – but do you know what your figure really is? It’s much likely a lot less than that, say $500,000 or $1m.
And like David Bach in The Latte Factor, it’s not about being so frugal that you can’t enjoy your life any more – it’s about intentional spending: cutting back on the things that don’t bring you joy, but spending guilt-free on the things that do.
This book is great for beginners who want a simple, actionable plan to build wealth. It's ideal for people who want a low-maintenance, high-reward approach to personal finance. I found it really useful to read, especially alongside the other personal finance books on this list with other viewpoints, and covering other topics.
The impact of these personal finance books on my life
You can’t expect change to happen overnight, but three years down the line, I can say confidently that they actually have been life changing.
I think about assets and liabilities now, and eschew drinking sessions with friends in favour of lower cost fun – I invest what I would have spent on beers into a couple of ETFs in my stocks and share ISA. In three years I’ve now invested £2,800 with a total value of £3,800 – that’s £1,000 of growth, which you just wouldn’t get with a high yield savings account.
I remember the first time I deposited funds into my stocks and shares ISA: it was exhilarating and almost felt naughty. But I’ve forecasted what my retirement ‘number’ is and at the age of 42, I now know that have to go pretty hard at investing if I want to bring my retirement age forward by living off of dividends and draw down from capital growth.
Understanding fiat currency and inflation also changed my outlook on everything money-related. To hedge my bets, with some saying that Bitcoin will eventually reach £1million, I invest any roundups and the odd tenner here and there, into BTC. It feels like some sort of cheat when I notice that stocks or BTC are on a downward trend – most people start selling through fear, but it’s actually on sale, and the best time to buy for growth and profit in years to come (Buffett also said, ‘be fearful when others are buying, buy when others are fearful.’)
I can now confidently manage my investments and see the bigger picture, tens of years down the line. And that extends to my family, too.
I’ve opened all of my nephews a Junior stocks and shares ISA too – one thing that I really wish someone had done for me is invest from when I was a child. The 40 year timeframe means that even small investments can grow unbelievably large over that period, and that will help set them up in a way that I didn’t have in my 40s.
Because I educated myself about equities (i.e. stocks & shares), I could then understand my workplace and self invested pension. I transferred out of a very average provider into Vanguard, buying mostly the S&P500 (a basket of stocks representing the biggest 500 companies in the US). I’m relatively young, so because I read those books I knew I could handle the risk.
I’ve also for the first time started a rainy day savings fund, which sits in a high yield savings account. So that anxiety around never having any money is starting to fade.
The best bit is that any interest on those savings I use like a rich person: I invest them into my stocks and shares ISA. That means that my money – given to me for free – is making me more money. That is one of the best wealth hacks out there.
I'm not going to be the richest man in Babylon (another personal finance book I've yet to read but heard great things about), but I'm definitely on track to be much better off than I otherwise would have been.
And it’s all thanks to reading these seven life-changing personal finance books. I hope they will help you too.
Commentaires