Recommendations

Everything below has come up somewhere on this site already. This page just collects it in one place, with a link back to the post where I actually explained why.

Books

• The Little Book of Common Sense Investing — John C. Bogle. The index-fund argument, in one line: buy the haystack, not the needle. Discussed in Every money book I've read, condensed to what actually stuck.
• A Random Walk Down Wall Street — Burton Malkiel. The best single book here if you want to understand markets rather than just comply with the advice. Same post.
• RESET — David Sawyer. A rare UK-specific FI book. Same post.
• The Millionaire Next Door — Thomas Stanley and William Danko. Read it for the behaviour, not the now-dated numbers. Same post.
• Playing with FIRE — Scott Rieckens. A good first book to hand to someone; principles over detail. Same post.
• Enough? — Paul Armson. The book behind Calculating my own "enough" — aim for the return you need, not the maximum your risk tolerance permits.
• Boomerang — Michael Lewis. Not personal finance at all; the most entertaining book on the list by a distance. From the money-books post.
• Humankind (Rutger Bregman), Against Empathy (Paul Bloom), The Perils of Perception (Bobby Duffy), The Joy of Work (Bruce Daisley), and Getting to Yes (Roger Fisher and William Ury). Not about money, but the ones that changed how I think about it anyway. All from the money-books post.

Blogs

• Monevator — the one to start with for any product decision (which broker, which platform).
• The Escape Artist — the mindset, which is the actually hard part.
• Banker on FIRE — the only one that takes multi-part, bonus-heavy compensation seriously.
• FIRE v London, Financially MINT, Mr Money Mustache, Early Retirement Extreme, Mad Fientist, and Financial Samurai — reviewed in full in Nine FI blogs, reviewed from a UK perspective, including what each is good for and where a UK reader has to translate.

Tools & apps

• Emma — the account aggregator behind One dashboard instead of three banks and most of the spending-data posts on this site.
• Vinted — secondhand marketplace, discussed in Why I only ever buy on Vinted.
• Too Good To Go — surplus food at a discount, covered in Secondhand and surplus-food habits, quantified.

Frameworks

• George Kinder's three questions — the life-planning exercise behind I answered Kinder's three questions in my twenties.
• The pre-mortem, from The Joy of Work — imagine the plan has failed, write the story of how, then go and fix whatever you just described. Mentioned in the risk register post; still on my list to actually write up properly.

Nothing here is sponsored, and nothing here is a recommendation to buy, invest in, or subscribe to anything — just a list of what's actually influenced what I write.