Every money book I've read, condensed to what actually stuck

I take notes on books instead of annotating them, mostly because I borrow a lot of them from the library and defacing library books is a bit much. The side effect is that I've ended up with a permanent record of what each book actually gave me, stripped of the padding.

Here's the whole lot, honestly assessed.

The money books

The Little Book of Common Sense Investing — John C. Bogle

The argument in one line: the median investor earns the median market return minus costs, so buy the cheapest passive index fund and stop. Costs are the largest single determinant of your outcome.

• Changing funds reduces returns. Every switch is a cost.
• Long-term market returns will likely be lower in future than they have been in the past.
• Reversion to the mean — most good performance is luck, not skill.
• You can't identify a good active fund from its short-term record, its long-term record, or its adviser.
• "Don't look for the needle, buy the haystack."

Verdict: it gets repetitive, and as it says on the tin, it's common sense. If you already invest in index funds you'll learn nothing. Where it earns its place is in giving you the framing to explain the argument to someone else. It advocates anywhere from 75/25 to 25/75 stocks/bonds depending on risk tolerance, and — being written for Americans — talks about the S&P 500 constantly and wouldn't push you towards a global fund. UK readers should adjust.

A Random Walk Down Wall Street — Burton Malkiel

The one to read if you're interested in how the market actually works rather than just what to do on Monday morning.

• Firm foundation theory (value) versus castle-in-the-air theory (growth).
• Technical and fundamental analysis: neither reliably helps, especially now that everyone knows about both.
• Weak versus strong efficient market hypothesis, and where each breaks.
• Bubbles and behavioural economics — don't overtrade, don't be overconfident.
• Modern portfolio theory genuinely works to improve risk-adjusted returns through diversification.
• Capital asset pricing model: essentially, take on more risk for more return.
• Smart beta and risk parity are interesting but don't beat index funds by enough to justify their fees.

It closes with solid all-round material on cash, inflation, tax, bonds and costs, model portfolios by age group, a section for people determined to stock pick anyway, and a genuinely good explanation of derivatives and futures.

Verdict: the best single book here if you want to understand rather than just comply.

RESET — David Sawyer

A UK FI book, which immediately puts it in a very small category.

• Visualise the destination, enjoy the journey.
• Declutter your life, not just your spending.
• Suggests a 3.5% safe withdrawal rate for UK readers, which is conservative.
• 100% equities during accumulation (emergency fund aside), shifting to 80/20 in decumulation.
• Because it's aimed at a midlife audience, it covers wills, legacy planning and healthcare — topics the twenty-something blogs skip entirely.
• Notably, it opposes the low-information diet that MMM and The Escape Artist advocate.

Verdict: worth it for the UK specifics. The suggested portfolio of six index funds requiring annual rebalancing is more complexity than I'd take on for something like a 0.1% saving in ongoing charges.

The Millionaire Next Door — Thomas Stanley and William Danko

Stat-heavy academic work that's still reasonably accessible if you're not already deep in this world. The core finding — that most wealth is accumulated quietly by people who don't look wealthy — has aged well.

Verdict: the house prices haven't aged well at all, and they date the book badly. Read it for the behaviour, not the numbers.

Playing with FIRE — Scott Rieckens

A US family's story of exploring FIRE over a year while learning from the best-known people in it. Starts from an upper-middle-class, very high-spending baseline, which makes the early chapters more relatable than most.

Verdict: principles-based rather than detail-based — frugality and lifestyle design, not investing. Good first book to hand to someone. Not a reference.

Enough? — Paul Armson

Life planning with no technical detail whatsoever. The central image is a bucket with inflows and outflows, and the goal is to die with an empty one — not to accumulate as much as possible.

The idea that stuck: aim only for the return you actually need. Take the minimum risk required to fund the life you want, rather than the maximum risk your tolerance permits. Those are very different numbers and most people optimise the wrong one.

Verdict: a basic introduction, and deliberately so. It aligns closely with evidence-based investing and Kinder life planning, which is presumably why the life planner we saw recommended it.

Boomerang — Michael Lewis

Not a personal finance book at all — an account of what different countries did with cheap credit in the dark, and how the financial crisis played out across Europe.

• Iceland stopped being fishermen and started being bankers, building banks larger than the country itself.
• Greece paid public employees enormous amounts, didn't collect taxes, and ran the government off balance sheet.
• Ireland lent money to itself to buy overpriced development land, then guaranteed all the debt rather than just protecting depositors — nationalising the losses.
• Germany did nothing dodgy domestically; it simply lent enormous sums to everyone else who lost it, then lent again through the ECB to rescue its own banks indirectly. Its bankers weren't well paid or experienced in CDO markets, so US banks treated them as the willing counterparty for trades they wanted to short.

Verdict: the most entertaining book on this list by a distance.

The ones that aren't about money

These changed how I think, which eventually changes how you spend.

Humankind — Rutger Bregman. Evidence-based case that we're the most social animal and should structure society accordingly. When in doubt, assume the best. Think in win-win. Ask more questions. Temper your empathy, train your compassion. Try to understand the other. Avoid the news. Don't be ashamed to do good. Be realistic.

Against Empathy — Paul Bloom. Empathy means feeling what someone else feels, which is not the same as understanding it — and understanding is the useful one. We weigh single emotional cases above large numbers of sufferers, favour people similar to us, and count what has already happened above what will happen. You can be moral without empathy, and in personal life you sometimes have to make people unhappy to teach them something.

The Perils of Perception — Bobby Duffy. Stories may matter more than statistics. We scale our estimates towards the middle, assume everyone is like us, and hold a rose-tinted view of the past because we don't remember the bad parts. The key move: don't try to train your biases away, recognise them and plan your response.

The Joy of Work — Bruce Daisley. Eliminate distractions when focus is needed. More haste, less speed — don't skip lunch, stop context switching. Diversity makes everyone more uncomfortable and improves results anyway. Run a pre-mortem: predict how the plan fails, then fix it in advance. And borrow crew resource management from aviation for difficult conversations — opening, expression of concern, outline of the problem, suggested solution, invitation to agree.

Getting to Yes — Roger Fisher and William Ury. Focus on process over positions. Separate the people from the problem. Focus on interests. Brainstorm options creatively. Use objective criteria. Always know your BATNA — best alternative to a negotiated agreement.

The pattern

Read enough of these and the same three things keep surfacing: costs compound against you, complexity almost never pays for itself, and the hardest number to work out isn't your return — it's how much is enough.

Not advice, not a recommendation to buy anything. I'm not qualified and I'm mostly just writing down what I read on the train.