The Psychology of Money: Timeless lessons on wealth, greed, and happiness

Morgan Housel

Sep 2020 · Harriman House Limited

About this ebook

Doing well with money isn’t necessarily about what you know. It’s about how you behave. And behavior is hard to teach, even to really smart people.

Money—investing, personal finance, and business decisions—is typically taught as a math-based field, where data and formulas tell us exactly what to do. But in the real world people don’t make financial decisions on a spreadsheet. They make them at the dinner table, or in a meeting room, where personal history, your own unique view of the world, ego, pride, marketing, and odd incentives are scrambled together.

In The Psychology of Money, award-winning author Morgan Housel shares 19 short stories exploring the strange ways people think about money and teaches you how to make better sense of one of life’s most important topics.

Ratings and reviews

I think people will benefit greatly from reading this book. For me, it will be reread on a yearly basis. How I wish my 20-year-old self had been given this book. I understood the power of compounding from a fairly young age, but never felt confident in my financial position to invest. This book helped me better understand my own behaviors and my own unique reasons for hesitation. I will take what I have learned from this book, and help teach my children begin to invest now, regularly. For them to do what I should have been doing as a teen, in my 20's, 30's, and beyond.

Awesome book with so much of valuable insight on each page! As Benjamin Graham once said: "The investor's chief problem - even his worst enemy - is likely to be himself!", Morgan's book goes a long way in helping investors protect themselves from themselves! One of my best investment books of all time.

This book highlights the importance of savings rather than any specific financial theory, and encourages the reader to keep lifestyle low-key no matter how much money we have earned. It's worth reading.

About the author

Morgan Housel is a partner at The Collaborative Fund and a former columnist at The Motley Fool and The Wall Street Journal. He is a two-time winner of the Best in Business Award from the Society of American Business Editors and Writers, winner of the New York Times Sidney Award, and a two-time finalist for the Gerald Loeb Award for Distinguished Business and Financial Journalism.