ESU announces new business Coworking Space

EAST STROUDSBURG — East Stroudsburg University’s Innovation Center will soon open its doors for up-and-coming entrepreneurs and business owners to grow and connect in an expanded, state-of-the-art environment.On Friday, September 13, ESU President Dr. Marcia Welsh, Vice President of Economic Development and Entrepreneurship Mary Frances Postupack and Director of the Business Accelerator and Entrepreneurship program Keith Modzelewski announced a new Coworking Space [...]

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How to Make Money Blogging in 2019

I have a major disclaimer before we begin.

A good part of my career has been working for some of the folks in this list.

In fact, I was personally responsible for setting annual revenue goals and hitting those goals while I was the Senior Director of Growth and Product at I Will Teach You To Be Rich. In that case specifically, I’m extremely familiar with revenue totals and what drove that revenue.

Not to mention the affiliate commissions that were paid out to some of the people on this list, numbers that were shared in confidence after a few too many drinks, and second-hand rumors that I picked up along the way.

Unfortunately, I’ve got sad news.

I’m not going to share any of that insider knowledge. Sorry.

Some folks don’t mind publishing their revenue numbers but others keep it extremely private. If I shared that kind of info on how their blogs make money, I’d shatter the trust they placed in me. I take that trust very seriously.

For this post, I’m only going to be sharing revenue numbers that have been shared publicly.

Now here’s what I can do for you.

With the background that I have in this space, there are some common rules of thumb for figuring out revenue. They’re not perfect rules but they do tend to get the right number of digits. And after a while, you get a general sense for people’s revenue based on the size of their audience.

For most folks on this list, I’ll give a guess based on their public audience size and any hints that they’ve released publicly about their revenue. I’ll clearly label at is as a guess and you should take it with a grain of salt.

Ramit Sethi — I Will Teach You To Be Rich

Revenue = I can’t tell you

If you poke around the site a bit, it’s pretty obvious that the blog makes most of its money from infoproducts.

Ramit is absolutely at the top of his game when it comes to infoproducts and I consider this site one of the best to learn from if you’re considering monetizing your own blog with infoproducts. Make sure to sign up for his email list — you’ll start getting the launch funnels and you’ll be able to see how it all works.

There are also a few products available for purchase from the products page. That’s a great source for inspiration to see what an amazing infoproduct sales page looks like.

Marie Forleo — marieforleo.com

Revenue = My guess is several million per year

Marie has been blogging for a while now. She also put in a lot of work into her YouTube channel.

He content has a great reputation and her copy is world class. I assume most of her revenue comes from infoproducts, particularly her flagship program B-School. It’s been a while since I followed Marie closely but for a period, she launched B-School once per year.

She’s an amazing person to study if you want to learn how to produce high-quality positive content. She’s also brilliant at balancing valuable content with going for the sale in an authentic way.

Steve Kamb — Nerd Fitness

Revenue = Over $1 million per year

According to this post, Steve’s doing over seven figures with his business. It’s a mix of infoproducts, coaching, and bootcamps. He also wrote a book called Level Up Your Life.

What I love most about Steve’s business is how he’s chosen a specific segment of the market and differentiated himself from other fitness blogs. The fitness space is crazy competitive but by branding his entire business around fitness for nerds, he clearly separates himself from that competition. Even in the most competitive categories, there are still opportunities to target a niche with your blog and make real money with it.

Amy Porterfield — amyporterfield.com

Revenue = At least $2–3 million per year, maybe more

Amy’s About page states that she’s built a multi-million dollar business, something that I absolutely believe based on her audience size.

I’m assuming that the vast majority of her revenue is from her infoproducts, but it looks like she does some affiliate promotion too. Her affiliate page is pretty classy and well done. It’s a great example of how to promote products in an authentic and non-pushy way.

Jon Morrow — Smart Blogger

Revenue = Over $1.2 million per year

In this post, Jon states that he’s doing over $100K per month in affiliate revenue which is pretty impressive.

He also has several of infoproducts available for purchase on his site. I bet these do about $30–50K per year on their own. I’m not sure what Jon’s email funnels look like but if he’s pushing launch funnels aggressively, he could easily have another few million in revenue from infoproducts on top of his affiliate revenue.

Darren Rowse — Problogger

Revenue = My guess is about $10 million per year

Problogger has been around since 2004. That’s an eternity in online marketing. It’s one of the original “how to blog” blogs. Darren also owns Digital Photography School which has 8X as much traffic and revenue as Problogger.

Darren did do a income report on the first half of 2016. At that time, 46% of his revenue from both sites came from affiliates, 31% came from infoproducts, and the rest from a smattering of different categories.

Seth Godin — seths.blog

Revenue = My guess is over $2 million per year

Seth Godin had plenty of success before his blog: he’s written 18 books, built and sold a company to Yahoo, and then was a VP at Yahoo. And his blog has cemented him as the leading marketing thought leader. If you were trying to come up with an ideal example of a thought leader, you’d have a hard time finding a better example than Seth Godin.

Seth’s blog is the original, longest running, and possibly highest value blog in marketing. He’s posted every day for like 20 years or something.

For a long time, he never montized it. Unless you consider featuring his books occasionally to count as monetization. Recently, he has done a few infoproducts including the altMBA and The Marketing Seminar. I went through The Marketing Seminar myself and quite a few people were in the community, so it sold well. Seth’s site says that over 5,000 people took the course in total. At $800 per sale, that’s about $4 million in total spread over several years. Plus all the revenue from altMBA.

Neil Patel — neilpatel.com

Revenue = I’m not even going to guess

I worked for Neil when he was a co-founder of KISSmetrics. He’s the one that originally hired me. Also worked with him on some other projects after that. I’m not going to even hazard a revenue guess here since I don’t want to reveal anything that Neil would prefer to keep private.

He has stated publicly that his main site, neilpatel.com, generates over 2.5 million visitors per month. I’ll let you figure out the revenue from there.

Selena Soo — selenasoo.com

Revenue = Over $1.6 million per year

In this article, Selena reported that she made $1.6 million in 2017. I assume the majority of her revenue comes from infoproducts that she launches to her email list periodically. Considering the stage of her business, she’s built out a pretty impressive infoproduct portfolio along with some higher ticket mastermind offers.

Sam Dogen — Financial Samurai

Revenue = My guess is about $1 million per year

Sam gives a few hints on what he makes with his site. First, he does give the revenue of his infoproduct ebook which is $36,000 per year.

Funny enough, he chooses not to include his Adsense revenue or affiliate revenue as “passive” income within any of his passive income reports. Most folks in the industry would consider these revenue sources to be passive.

Sam does break down some hypothetical revenue amounts of blogs of different sizes here. One example includes a personal finance blog that’s generating about one million visitors per month. I remember Sam stating somewhere along the line that he has about that much traffic. The traffic estimation tools like Ahrefs also put his site in the range. So, the example that he gives should be close to his actuals. Using his projections as a guide and knowing that he has plenty of affiliate links along with Adsense on his site, a $1 million per year estimate should be close.

Brian Dean — Backlinko

Revenue = Over $1 million per year

He launches infoproducts to his email list a couple of times per year. I believe he has a course on SEO and one on YouTube. With his traffic volume, each of these launches should be doing upper six figures, possibly $1 million per launch.

He has stated in a few interviews like this one that he’s doing seven figures per year.

This is a great example of a business that’s focused really heavily on generating traffic, turning that traffic into email subscribers, then monetizing via a few infoproduct launches per year. It can seem magical to have a business with ridiculous profit margins at this stage. Most of us would love to have a $1 million per year business with a super small team and a handful of moving pieces.

James Dahle — White Coat Investor

Revenue = Over $1 million per year

James used to publish his annual revenue in his annual state of the blog posts but stopped as his blog became more well known. Here’s his 2019 state of the blog. His last reported income was $187,862 in 2014. He does mention multiple times that he’s now running a seven-figure business, so his current revenue is at least $1 million per year.

He does have a book by the same name. Looking through his site, the majority of his revenue comes from affiliates, ads, and sponsorships.

His email list is extremely small for the size of his blog — it’s only 21,725 subscribers. And with a small email list, any infoproduct launch is going to be limited to five figures. He does have an infoproduct on creating your own financial plan for $499. If he focused on conversion to email and got good at infoproducts, he could add another $1–2 million in revenue to his business.

Tim Ferriss — tim.blog

Revenue = My guess is about $10 million per year

Tim has a massive blog that’s been around for a long time. He started it before he even launched his first book, The 4 Hour Workweek.

Currently, I assume that the majority of Tim’s income comes from his podcast sponsorships. I have seen ads on his blog in the past but it doesn’t look like there are any right now. I don’t think he’s ever done an infoproduct or pursued affiliate ads aggressively.

According to this form, his podcast sponsorships go for $36K per slot. At 4–5 slots per episode, that’s $144,000 per episode at least. Tim averages about six podcasts per month, which would produce $864,000 per month or $10,368,000 per year.

The reason I’m not going to even guess is that I don’t have any experience buying or selling podcast sponsorships which I assume are his main source of income right now. Also, sites with Tim’s reach tend to start breaking standard revenue rules. Having one of the largest and highest rated podcasts can give you a lot of leverage, allowing you to charge more than normal on each sponsorship slot.

Otherwise, Tim has used his blog to promote his books heavily over the years. They include The 4-Hour Workweek, The 4-Hour Body, The 4-Hour Chef, Tools of Titans, and Tribe of Mentors.

Timothy Sykes — timothysykes.com

Revenue = Over $25 million per year

Timothy has been around for a while now, predominantly selling infoproducts on how to invest in penny stocks. According to this interview with Nathan Latka, Timothy was on track to do $25–27 million in revenue in 2016, $20 million of which came from infoproducts.

Timothy is a great person to follow if you want to see how an infoproduct business looks at scale.

Josh Axe — Dr. Axe

Revenue = Did $11 million per year in 2015, could be as high as $50–70 million per year now

Dr. Axe is a massive site with a huge audience. According to this press release, it has 17 million visitors per month, which is insane. They also push products pretty hard via their email list. It’s obvious that they know what their doing. Their revenue is a mix of infoproducts, affiliates, and supplements.

Supplements are a great category with nice margins. I only have a little experience in the health and fitness category but the advice I always get from the health and fitness experts is to go hard on supplements.

I did hear that they have a solid paid marketing engine going for their funnels. If that’s true, they could be doing easily $50–70 million per year by now.

I consider Dr. Axe to be a great example of what a health and fitness blog looks like when taken to its absolute height. If you’re considering a health and fitness blog, I’d study Dr. Axe closely

Peter Adeney — Mr. Money Mustache

Revenue = About $400,000 per year

According to this article from the New Yorker, Peter pulled in about $400,000 per year as of 2016. Ahrefs reports that Peter’s traffic has been static since the 2016 period. If that’s true, I would expect his current revenue to be around $400,000. Sounds like the majority of the revenue, possibly even all of it, comes from affiliates.

AJ Harbinger and Johnny Dzubak — Art of Charm

Revenue = My guess is $5–10 million per year

Jordan Harbinger didn’t reveal exact revenue but did say that it’s multiple seven figures per year. Based on the fact that the revenue is mostly infoproducts and the overall size of the audience, my guess is that Art of Charm does $5–10 million per year in revenue.

In 2018, Jordan Harbinger split from the Art of Charm and started his own podcast.

Pat Flynn — Smart Passive Income

Revenue = $2,171,652 per year

Pat Flynn posts all his income reports here, going back all the way to 2008.

Not sure if Pat decided to stop but it doesn’t look like he’s posted any new income reports since 2017. Regardless, I highly recommend reading through the first few years of income reports from Pat. That’ll give you a strong sense for what it takes to start making money with a blog.

The majority of Pat’s revenue comes from affiliate offers and his own infoproducts, about 50/50 between the two. He also has a few books published, How to Be Better at Almost Everything and Will it Fly? Other than the months he received the advance from the publisher, I bet these books have a negligible direct impact on revenue.

John Lee Dumas — Entrepreneur on Fire

Revenue = $2,029,744 per year

No one really needs to guess at John Lee Dumas’ revenue, he posts monthly income reports directly to his site.

He also put together a nifty revenue breakdown by source:

Sponsorships are slightly larger than everything else. Otherwise a pretty even split between infoproducts, affiliates, and his journals (The Freedom Journal, The Mastery Journal, and The Podcast Journal).

To get a sense for how blogs really make money, I highly recommend you read through the monthly income reports from the last 12 months for Entrepreneur on Fire. You’ll get an excellent feel for what a seven-figure blog looks like. I also recommend you read through the income reports from 2012 and 2013, which will show you what revenue looks like at the beginning and how it changes over time on the path to $1 million per year.

Navid Moazzez — navidmoazzez.com

Revenue = My guess is $300–500K per year

Navid is in the online marketing space and offers infoproducts on virtual summits. According to his About page, he’s earned over a $1 million dollars in “a few years.” Safe to say he’s easily doing six figures off his blog. Hence my guess above.

Tim Urban — Wait But Why

Revenue = At least $100,000, possibly $1+ million per year

Tim Urban got crazy popular and his blog posts were being shared all over the place for a while.

This is probably an example of what most people dream of when they start a blog. They plan to write a bunch of stuff, a rabid fan base will appear out of nowhere, they’ll offer some t-shirts, posters, and a Patreon account to make tons of passive income. They’ll finish by riding into the sunset of eternal blogging glory.

For Tim Urban, that’s basically what happened. And he absolutely deserves it. His content is phenomenal. It’s so good that people have been angry because he hasn’t posted in a while. Very few of us can write content that good. I can promise you no one gets upset when I stop blogging. So for us mortals, we should look to some of the other examples on this list for how to monetize our blogs.

I know that I gave a really broad range on the revenue here. Blogs like this are really tough to guess. Tim clearly has a massive, adoring audience. That doesn’t necessarily mean he’s swimming in gold. Although he might be. Blogs with massive audiences like this sometimes make a ton of money, and sometimes they make very little. It also looks like his main source of revenue is his ecommerce store. Unlike consulting, speaking, infoproducts, or affiliates, the margins on ecommerce products are much smaller. It’s entirely possible that he’s making a ton of top-line revenue but only enough profit to live a decent lifestyle.

That’s pretty common with ecommerce entrepreneurs. They claim that they’re making millions of dollars with their business but only take home $50–100K per year. Once you factor in costs of goods sold and overhead, there isn’t a ton left over. I have no idea if Tim Urban falls into this bucket. I simply don’t know.

Noah Kagan — OkDork, Sumo, and AppSumo

Revenue: $10M last year and growing

Noah’s business is based around four complimentary sites:   

• Sumo.com: Free marketing tools to grow your business
• AppSumo: Groupon for geeks
• KingSumo: Giveaway web app or WordPress plugin
• BriefcaseHQ: Netflix for business software

This system of related businesses is one of his tips for growing a successful business. He thinks of these businesses like a pyramid — KingSumo helps grow your business with giveaways, Sumo (which is the core product) arms those businesses with the tools they need for marketing, and BriefcaseHQ and AppSumo provide the rest of the tools. Creating a system of interlocking tools means you don’t need to find new customers; you can simply market to the customers you already have.

This reminds me of Target adding in groceries. They increased their revenue by asking, What are our existing customers buying that they aren’t buying from us? What do they need that I could sell them?

Noah has an even better analogy: it’s like buying another book from an author you already love. If you love a book an author’s written, of course you’re going to but their next book and their next book.

He’s also got a lot of thoughts on setting the right pricing structure, leveraging recurring revenue, and bundling that’s all worth studying as well.

Shane Parrish — Farnam Street

Revenue: It’s all been reinvested into the business, plus speaker fees

Shane started his blog to track his own personal learning and development — he didn’t have any grand ambitions for the project, and the original url, 68131.blogger.com, shows it. Today his newsletter has 200,000 subscribers and Farnam Street gets 1M pageviews a month.

How does he make money? Well, “earn money” vs. “make money” is a good distinction here. Shane says he’s reinvested most of the money back into the business, “In 2014, I think we actually lost money. In 2015, we didn’t lose money, which was good. … I will say that I’ve never actually personally made a penny off Farnam Street. It’s all been reinvested back into content, experience, trying new things, and that’s the way that hopefully I foresee the future.”

He makes money in a variety of ways: he first paid his expenses with Amazon affiliate links, then in 2014 he started his first 9-month partnership deal, newsletter sponsorships, conferences, speaker fees, infoproducts, a podcast, a forthcoming book, and a membership plan for his site that you can choose what you pay, currently either $149 or $249. His model is based on providing free content to many and creating a base of super fans who’ll pay for more of that content, subsidize the free content to give back, and gain access to even more: a book club, a discussion group, and private Ask Me Anythings. If 5% of his 200,000 newsletter subscribers convert (that’d be 10,000 members), and each of them signed up at the $149 level, that’d be $1.5M a year. 

Shane regularly turns down speaking engagements for $20,000 because it’s not how he wants to make money, and he doesn’t optimize his in-person workshops for revenue. He’s always asking what’s in the best interest of the business. That means the bulk of the revenue comes from memberships.

I agree with his advice: “The audience will grow if you put out good content.” And, “I know how easy it is for people to copy our content and even our business model. So that drives a lot of what we do. We want to do things that are hard to copy and that means we can’t cherry-pick what’s easy, because there is a lot of competition in easy.”

Ready to build you own blog that makes money?

I know the list above is full of people making serious money.

Here’s the crazy part.

For every blogger making a million dollars, there are thousands that make enough money to quit their job and work on their blog full time.

The list is too long to keep track of — I wouldn’t be able to put it together.

It is absolutely reasonable to start a blog with the goal of quitting your job and being your own boss. So many people have already done it you’d be walking a well-traveled path at this point.

I also believe that there’s still a ton of opportunity to be made blogging. I see new up-and-coming bloggers every year. It’s still possible to start a blog today and have it support you. I put together a 12-step guide on how to start a blog here. It’ll walk you through the whole process.

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My “Five Books” for Financial and Life Improvement

In last week’s Dozen Pieces of Inspiration, I made a reference to the website Five Books, where people in various fields recommend five books related to that field.

Since then, I’ve been tossing around that very idea in my head over and over again. If I were to recommend five books in an appropriate category for The Simple Dollar, probably “Financial and Life Improvement,” what five books would they be?

One book was very easy to pick. Two others came pretty quickly on their heels. With the two other slots… I had to struggle a little bit, but I think I came around to some wonderful choices.

So, without further ado, here are the five books I would choose if I were to select “five books for financial and life improvement.”

Your Money or Your Life by Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin

This was the “no brainer” book on this list, as it would be the one book I would recommend to almost anyone who found themselves struggling financially. This book was the essential book for me when I started to turn my financial life around, and it’s had a similar profound impact on many readers.

In a nutshell, this book is about the relationship between your finances and the other aspects of your life that you care about, particularly your time. The book introduces a ton of concepts that are really powerful in terms of evaluating your money use and the real impact that has on your life as a whole.

I’ll mention two that really stand out for me.

One is the idea of your “real hourly wage.” Most people think of their jobs in terms of their salary or in terms of the amount of money they make per hour. This book instead focuses on how much money you actually get to keep in exchange for an hour of your life. You might work for eight hours, but are you also including the hour of commuting that you have to do and the hour you sit in your chair at home slumped over because you’re burnt out after your workday? You’re really handing ten hours over to your job. What about time spent doing things like buying work clothes or going out with coworkers or traveling for work? That adds up. On the other hand, you might know how much you “make,” but have you subtracted out taxes? Have you subtracted out the cost of eating out with coworkers? Have you subtracted out the cost of your wardrobe? As you start subtracting work-related expenses from your income and adding in all of those extra hours you devote to work or thinking about work or getting to work, your hourly wage drops precipitously. That resultant number is your real hourly wage, and it’s very useful to use that as a comparison point for everything you spend money on. You might nominally make $15 per hour, but once you add in the extra hours devoted to work and subtract out the money spent on things related to work, you’re actually only keeping $8 an hour. If you spend $20 going out for a meal at Applebee’s versus spending $4 making a meal at home, you’re basically trading two hours of your life for the privilege of Applebee’s versus your meal at home. Is that really worth it?

Another idea that’s really impactful is the fulfillment curve. Basically, the idea is that once you get past a relatively low level of purchasing, additional purchasing in that area leads to diminishing returns and can actually even lead to a decline in your enjoyment. There’s a “peak” where you get the most pleasure for your dollar, and it is very easy to overshoot that peak, often without realizing it. We aim for that peak and very, very often wind up on the far side, spending too much and getting too little overall value and pleasure out of that expense.

This book is loaded with concepts like this and yet manages to fit them all into a clear overall picture of your finances and how they relate to getting what you want out of life. To me, it’s the essential personal finance read.

While I’m going to name some alternate choices for all of the other books on this list, I can’t really think of a book that I would recommend as an alternative to this one. It deserves to be read and thought about by anyone who is struggling with lining up their finances with what they want out of life.

The Total Money Makeover by Dave Ramsey

If you’re struggling with debt and with getting the very basics of your life in order (like keeping the bills paid), this is likely the best book on the market for you. Dave Ramsey offers a very straightforward plan for getting out of debt and couples it with a coaching style that serves as a powerful motivator to carry through with that plan.

Ramsey’s plan centers around seven “baby steps” that people should take to move from a disastrous personal debt situation to debt freedom (or close to it). They are, in a nutshell:
+ Baby Step 1: $1,000 to start an emergency fund
+ Baby Step 2: Pay off all debt using the Debt Snowball
+ Baby Step 3: 3 to 6 months of expenses in savings
+ Baby Step 4: Invest 15% of household income into Roth IRAs and tax-advantaged retirement accounts
+ Baby Step 5: College funding for children
+ Baby Step 6: Pay off your house early
+ Baby Step 7: Build wealth and give!

For those unfamiliar, a “debt snowball” means that you make a list of your debts from the smallest balance to the largest, then strive to make the largest possible extra payment on the debt with the smallest balance while making minimum payments on all of the others. When that debt is gone, move on to what is now the smallest debt and hit it with a hammer.

While I might have minor quibbles with the absolute specifics of this plan, I completely agree with the broad strokes of it, I admire its simplicity and straightforwardness, and it will work. Couple that with Dave’s coaching style, which will be a home run for some people, and this book gets a high recommendation from me.

A couple of alternate choices for a good book about getting out of debt and getting started on your financial journey include You Need a Budget by Jesse Mecham and I Will Teach You to Be Rich by Ramit Sethi. You Need a Budget focuses on a simple way of developing an actual budget that works for people, while I Will Teach You to Be Rich offers good practical advice on the foundational big financial moves people should make early in their professional lives.

The Bogleheads’ Guide to Investing (2nd Edition) by Taylor Larimore, Mel Lindauer, and Michael LeBoeuf

This is the single book I would recommend to anyone who needs to invest for goals like retirement or for a child’s education but isn’t exorbitantly wealthy. The book does a fantastic job of carefully laying out a plan for doing those things that doesn’t require a financial advisor or obsessive study of finances with a thoughtful philosophy behind all of it.

In short, the Bogleheads recommend investing in index funds, which are a low cost type of investment that aims to match the overall market rather than trying to beat the market. For example, if you are buying a very broad based stock index fund, that fund’s goal is to match the growth of the overall stock market by including tiny amounts of all available stocks and doing that as inexpensively as possible. You won’t get huge returns with this model, but you will get very good returns with a much higher level of consistency and you won’t lose it all, either.

The book guides you through why you should do this and the mechanics of how you can do it through your retirement plans at work, an IRA you might set up for yourself, or plans for your child’s education, aiming to maximize the tax benefits for you. While a bit dry in places, it does a very good job of spelling out in very clear language the “how’s” and “why’s” of investing for the average person in a way that’s logically consistent and balances reasonable risk with pretty good returns without spending a lot of time managing all the details.

Basically, at the point at which The Total Money Makeover begins to become less relevant to your financial life, meaning you’ve paid off your debts and are starting to save for retirement and other goals in earnest, this is the book to pick up. The two books cover almost none of the same ground in personal finance, but complement each other perfectly.

Another well rounded book about investing that I would highly recommend as an alternatives to this book is The Simple Path to Wealth by J.L. Collins. Collins covers much of the same material as the Bogleheads’ book above, with many of the same principles, but uses a more conversational style. If you found the Bogleheads’ book to be a little dry, this might be a better read, but I find that the Bogleheads’ book serves as a great reference book and I turn to it more often (perhaps out of familiarity). However, both books remain on my shelf and I suspect that the authors would all laud the other book and would have a lot in common if they sat down for a conversation.

Atomic Habits by James Clear

Regardless of what stage you’re in on your personal finance journey, you’re going to eventually realize that a lot of your success in terms of both improving your income and keeping your spending habits under control comes down to having good routines in your life and being able to make good decisions in the moment. Controlling your impulses and having a daily set of routines that guide you toward your big goal is absolutely fundamental. If your ordinary days don’t guide you toward where you want to be, you’ll never get there.

I considered a lot of books on developing better personal habits and routines, but I think the best all-around book I’ve read in terms of making sense and providing good tools for actually applying the ideas inside is Atomic Habits by James Clear.

Clear’s core idea is that, if you have a sense of what your big goals are, at least in terms of the direction you want to go in life, the best way to get there is a systems-based approach, where you essentially have a handful of tiny habits that you do as a routine on a daily basis that will naturally guide you toward your goal. In terms of personal finance, those tiny habits would be oriented around reducing the overall spending in your average day by doing things like preparing meals at home, taking leftovers, filling your time with low-cost activities, and so on. If you make each day into a system of those habits, you’ll gradually move in a much healthier financial direction. Ask yourself, “what would a financially successful person do today?” and stick to that, making an effort to carry out the habits and routines that a financially successful person would have.

I would strongly point toward Triggers by Marshall Goldsmith as a complement to this book. They are both essentially tackling the same issue – how do I become the person I want to be? – from different angles, with Triggers focusing on behaviors and Atomic Habits focusing on tiny habits and routines. Both are great approaches, with one angle working well for some changes and the other working well for other changes.

Man’s Search for Meaning by Victor Frankl

The problem, of course, is that many people don’t know who they want to be or where they want to go.

My view is that personal finance success for anyone who is not exorbitantly wealthy is practically impossible without some level of inner contentment. Inner contentment is different for everyone, but it’s heavily tied to really understanding what you truly care about and value and having a life that supports those things, recognizing that even the difficult things are a part of life and that you can’t appreciate the good without some challenges along the way.

That journey toward inner contentment, to me, is an absolute fundamental part of financial success. Your financial state, particularly in terms of your personal choices and spending decisions, are just the surface of what’s going on underneath. We often use money to chase desires and chase away bad feelings that even we don’t understand, and modern marketing is really effective at nudging those underlying feelings. Having some level of inner contentment is absolutely key for resisting those urges and feeling naturally content with your life.

I thought about a lot of different books that could express this idea well. A Guide to the Good Life by William Irvine is certainly one of them, as is Why Buddhism Is True by Robert Wright and How to Be a Stoic by Massimo Pigliucci, among many others. However, I felt like each of those books really just described one particular path to inner contentment, whereas Man’s Search for Meaning is about the idea of that path as a whole.

Part of me wants to recommend this book first rather than last, but the reality is that many people are in an urgent place with their personal finances and going down a path toward internal contentment is not going to be the fix to their finances that they’re seeking. Rather, there’s a realization point with almost any personal change – finances included – that the changes they’re trying to make aren’t fixing what they want from life and a different approach is warranted.

In the end, one’s finances are just a big part of the expression of what we want out of life. When we’re unsure what we want and aren’t content with things, our finances tend to be a mess. It’s only when we’re more sure of what we want and are on a path toward contentment that we can get our finances in line with what we really want.

And, believe it or not, that brings us right back in a circle to Your Money or Your Life, the first book I recommended in this list.

Final Thoughts

My recommendation is that, if you’re struggling with your finances, at least one of these books will deeply speak to you, depending on where you’re at, and that Your Money or Your Life is probably the best jumping-in point by default, followed quickly by either The Total Money Makeover if you’re struggling with debt or The Bogleheads’ Guide to Investing (2nd Edition) if your debt is under control and you’re wanting to understand investing basics. The other books follow in almost a cycle, from purpose to plans to routine and back to purpose again, as we all need a helping hand at different points in that cycle at different times.

The amazing part is, many of the principles you’ll pick up from these books apply just as well to other aspects of your life – yes, even the more financially-focused ones.

It’s worth noting that many of the books in this article that I haven’t written about individually on this site before will eventually be discussed in detail, offering a detailed summary so you can know the high points of the book before deciding whether to read them yourself. Many of them have already been discussed before, and here are links to those earlier discussions:
+ Your Money or Your Life by Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin
+ The Total Money Makeover by Dave Ramsey
+ You Need a Budget by Jesse Mecham
+ Atomic Habits by James Clear
+ Triggers by Marshall Goldsmith

Good luck, and happy reading!

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