Finance & Investing — Reading & Resources

Seed list to start a budget / finances / investing section. Bias: worldview-first — paradigm-shifting reads that change how money, debt, and “enough” are seen, over tactical how-to. As books get read, promote them to wiki/Books/ notes; promote concepts under wiki/Money/ and cross-link wiki/Minimalism/.

Living list — append freely. Graduation target: Investing & Budgeting Mindsets (and Money, Condensed).

The reframes (what money, debt, and enough actually are)

• Your Money or Your Life — Vicki Robin. Money as life energy: every dollar is finite hours of life traded away. The philosophical root of financial independence and minimalism, and the bridge between them.
• Debt: The First 5,000 Years — David Graeber. An anthropologist dismantles 5,000 years of assumptions about money, debt, and morality (including the myth that barter came first). Sweeping, contrarian, civilizational in scope.
• Skin in the Game / Antifragile — Nassim Taleb (the Incerto). Risk, asymmetry, hidden fragility, and who bears the downside. Antifragile reframes how to position under any uncertainty.

Behavioral wisdom (how to think about money)

• The Psychology of Money, then Same as Ever — Morgan Housel. Why capable people do irrational things with money; what never changes. Dense with wisdom, highly re-readable.
• Die With Zero — Bill Perkins. A provocation against over-saving: optimize for life experiences, timed to when they land hardest.
• The Almanack of Naval Ravikant — Eric Jorgenson (compiler). ✓ Read — rated solid. Naval’s philosophy of wealth and happiness: leverage (capital, code, media), specific knowledge, owning equity, playing long-term games with long-term people.

Investing (for an actual portfolio)

• The Simple Path to Wealth — JL Collins. Reads as index-investing instruction; its real subject is freedom (“F-you money”).
• Just Keep Buying — Nick Maggiulli. Evidence demolishing financial intuition (market timing, dollar-cost averaging). Data as gravitas.
• The Most Important Thing — Howard Marks. The deeper end: risk, cycles, and “second-level thinking,” beautifully written.

Minimalism / the philosophy of enough

• Early Retirement Extreme — Jacob Lund Fisker. Systems-thinking minimalism by an engineer-physicist; a near-philosophical treatise on a low-consumption, high-competence, antifragile life.
• Letters from a Stoic / On the Shortness of Life — Seneca. Wealth-and-time wisdom from a man both rich and detached from it. Pairs with the existing wiki/Minimalism/ cluster.

Ongoing sources (websites)

• Mr. Money Mustache — financial independence with a worldview and an attitude.
• Collaborative Fund / Morgan Housel’s archive — short, durable essays on money and behavior.
• Of Dollars and Data (Nick Maggiulli) — evidence-based, myth-busting.
• Farnam Street (fs.blog) — mental models and decision quality; not money-specific, but the thinking discipline that underwrites good money decisions.
• Taleb’s Incerto — the essays behind the books.

Where to start

The trio that rewires the foundation before tactics: Your Money or Your Life (the reframe) → The Psychology of Money (the wisdom) → Debt: The First 5,000 Years (the gravitas).

Next

• Spin up Investing & Budgeting Mindsets as the permanent hub under wiki/Money/; demote this entry to a pointer once reading graduates.
• Create wiki/Books/ notes per title as read (start with the trio + Naval, already read).
• Cross-link wiki/Minimalism/ — the “enough” thread spans both sections.