Yahoo Finance 4 Personal Finance Books That Will Inspire You
When traveling down the long road toward financial freedom, it can sometimes be hard to keep your eyes looking forward toward your financial goals. With all the pleasures and distractions in life, those big financial goals can fade into the mist while today's desires get in the way.
What most of us need is something to help us keep our eyes on the road. What we need is a healthy dose of inspiration.
Here are four great personal finance books that offer that healthy dose of inspiration. Perhaps you need inspiration to build wealth. Maybe you need inspiration to get rid of debt or to dig through your all-too-real life to find ways to spend less. Maybe you just need a big push to change everything.
These four books can help you do just that.
"The Millionaire Next Door" by Thomas Stanley and William Danko centers on the research these two have done on how millionaires acquired their wealth and, just as importantly, managed to keep that wealth.
What the authors found is that most millionaires managed to get there by making some pretty smart yet common sense choices about their major possessions and life decisions. Millionaires are happy not having the newest and shiniest things. Instead, they find great value in building financial security and, in that security, the freedom to try new things.
Stanley and Danko's book is backed up by a lot of research, but unlike many research-based books you'll read, this one will cause you to see your own community differently. "The Millionaire Next Door" opens your eyes to where the real success lies and pushes you gently toward making smart choices that will take you there.
"The Complete Tightwad Gazette" by Amy Dacyczyn focuses on the nuts and bolts of home economics. Dacyczyn offers a voice that speaks to the chaotic and overly busy home lives that we all have and points out an endless array of things we can all do to spend less money in almost every aspect of home life.
The book is nicely divided into hundreds of short chapters and written with a warm, friendly and often humorous tone that resonates with a busy family life, leaving you with the strong sense that, yes, you can do these things too and trim an awful lot of spending out of your life without losing any of the things you truly hold dear.
It's Dacyczyn's real voice that wins the day here. She feels like someone you could sit down and have a cup of coffee with and just spill the beans about the little mistakes and foibles in your life -- like figuring out how to get out of the grocery store without spending too much. Then, she'll tell you a better way of doing it that leaves a warm smile on your face, just like a great friend would do.
"The Total Money Makeover" by Dave Ramsey provides a powerful plan and a forceful cheerleading voice in one's journey to overcome debt and begin building wealth. If you're struggling with a serious debt situation, this is the inspirational book to read.
As with his radio show, Ramsey leads this book with a straightforward seven step plan for how to deal with debt. He packs chapters with real stories of people achieving those steps, along with some motivational words that can help people put aside many of their money illusions and move toward their financial dreams.
"The Total Money Makeover" succeeds in the same way that a great coach succeeds. Ramsey's words inspire you to push harder for something better in your life.
"Your Money or Your Life" by Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin was the book that turned around my own financial life. Rather than looking strictly at dollars and cents, Dominguez and Robin take a much different approach. They focus on the value of one's life and the hours we spend working to earn money -- only to find that we spend that time and energy on things that perhaps aren't particularly fulfilling.
The book proposes some powerful life changes by the end, but that's not what makes this book a home run. "Your Money or Your Life " succeeds because it makes you rethink almost every aspect of your life -- the time you spend earning money (and how surprisingly pervasive it is throughout your waking hours), the value you actually get for all those hours and energy, and whether you use that value for anything that's genuinely life fulfilling.
It's heady stuff, but it's the stuff that convinced me to make real financial change in my life.
Regardless of your situation, there's a book out there that can provide you with the inspiration you need to put yourself in a better place. All you have to do is open that cover.
Trent Hamm is the founder of the personal finance website TheSimpleDollar.com, which provides consumers with resources and tools to make informed financial decisions.
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