Put this into practice

LEARN · GUIDE

Beginner's guide to managing your money

MoneyHelper

Impartial and free, which most money advice is not.

Government backed, free money guidance, including a budget planner.

TRY · 10 MIN

What Is Money For?

TAIU

Money is usually buying something other than what appears on the receipt.

Separates what money is being used to buy from what it is being used to avoid.

READ · BOOK

I Will Teach You To Be Rich

Ramit Sethi

Read it against Housel and Robin rather than instead of them. If the exercise concluded that your caution is inherited rather than proportionate, Sethi is the sharpest available argument that the answer is to spend deliberately on what matters and stop apologising for it.

Included here as a counterweight rather than a recommendation. Most of the good writing about money, including two of the other resources listed with this exercise, moves towards restraint, frugality and enough. Sethi goes the other way. His argument is that plenty of people already underspend on the few things they genuinely care about, that cutting small pleasures is a poor substitute for earning and negotiating properly, and that a rich life has to be described in specifics before any of the arithmetic is worth doing.

READ · BOOK

The Psychology of Money

Morgan Housel

Useful if you have read plenty about what to do with money and almost nothing about why you do what you already do.

Housel's argument is that financial behaviour is mostly not a maths problem. People handle money according to what they lived through, what they saw at home, and what they are frightened of. Read it for the chapters on enough and on wealth being the money you do not spend, which are the two ideas this exercise keeps running into.

READ · BOOK

Your Money or Your Life

Vicki Robin and Joe Dominguez

Worth the time if the exercise suggests you are earning well and still cannot say what the money is for. Take the arithmetic seriously and treat the frugality culture around the book more lightly.

The book's central move is to convert money back into the hours of your life it took to earn, then ask whether the thing you bought returned that time in any recognisable form. It is where the idea of enough is treated as a real number rather than a mood.

LISTEN · EPISODE

Morgan Housel on getting rich versus staying rich

Shane Parrish with Morgan Housel

A long conversation rather than an interview, and it spends most of its time on the part people skip: the difference between the behaviour that builds money and the behaviour that keeps it, and how much of both is inherited from the household you grew up in. Listen to it if the exercise turns up a childhood money story you had not thought about since.

READ · RESEARCH

Income and emotional well-being: a conflict resolved

Matthew Killingsworth, Daniel Kahneman and Barbara Mellers

Two researchers who had published opposite findings sat down together to work out who was right. The answer was both, in different populations: for most people happiness continues to rise with income, while for an unhappy minority it flattens once real hardship is behind them. It is the most honest available answer to the question of whether more money would help, and it refuses to give you a slogan in either direction.