Financial Book Club

Throughout your life, you’ve been slowly indoctrinated to believe that money is the only type of wealth. In reality, your wealthy life may involve money, but in the end, it will be defined by everything else.

After three years of research, personal experimentation, and thousands of interviews across the globe, Sahil Bloom has created a groundbreaking blueprint to build your life around five types of wealth: Time Wealth, Social Wealth, Mental Wealth, Physical Wealth, and Financial Wealth. A life of true fulfillment engages all five types—working dynamically, in concert across the seasons of your journey.

Through powerful storytelling, science-backed practices, and actionable insights, in The 5 Types of Wealth, you’ll learn:

How to prioritize energy-creating tasks to unlock more time in your day
How to create deeper bonds and build a powerful network
• How to engage your purpose to spark continuous growth
• How to maximize health and vitality through three simple principles
• How to achieve financial independence and define your version of “enough”

No matter where you are on your path—a recent graduate, new parent, midlife warrior, retiree, or anything in between—The 5 Types of Wealth will help you act on your priorities to create an instant positive impact in your daily life, make better decisions, and design the life you’ve always dreamed of.

The Psychology of Money: Timeless Lessons on Wealth, Greed, and Happiness by Morgan Housel

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 different ways people think about money and teaches you how to make better sense of one of life’s most important topics.

In this documentary, hopes soar when a Chinese company reopens a shuttered factory in Ohio. But a culture clash threatens to shatter an American dream.

The Art of Strategy: A Game Theorist's Guide to Success in Business and Life by Avinash K. Dixit and Barry J. Nalebuff.

For this meeting, we will discuss one article and three videos.

• AI Will Transform the Global Economy. Let’s Make Sure It Benefits Humanity by Kristalina Georgieva, managing director of the International Monetary Fund. January 14, 2024.
• The Economic Possibilities For My Grandchildren from IMF Managing Director’s Keynote Speech at King’s College, Cambridge, followed by a conversation with provost, Gillian Tett, featuring Kristalina Georgieva. March 14, 2024.
• A healthy economy should be designed to thrive, not grow by Kate Raworth with TED. April, 2018

• How do we create a better economy?  by TED-Ed. November, 2022.

This month we will be reading a fiction book!

Brooke Orr is on a mission to change her life and the world. Assisting an octogenarian billionaire in the quest to give away his vast fortune turns out to be deeply satisfying work, a noble life path. All you need to make the world a better place, it turns out, is the right ideals with the right amount of money. She and her billionaire make an uncommon pair: Brooke, 33, is a Black woman raised by a single mother in New York City; Asher Jaffee, 83, is a white business tycoon with an elaborate lifestyle. Each is exhilarated by the new friendship. Asher loves Brooke's willingness to spar with him, and Brooke finds her proximity to Asher's power intoxicating, even mind altering. As limits are increasingly pushed and unusual boundaries crossed, the line between need and want blurs dramatically.

An elder justice expert uncovers the failures in the systems that are supposed to protect us as we age, and provides a battle plan for families and policy-makers to counter the greed and incompetence. Between 1900 and 2000, Americans gained, on average, thirty years of life. That dazzling feat allowed tens of millions of Americans to reach the once-rare age of 85, now the fastest-growing age group. The bad news: For millions of Americans, the Golden Years are appallingly tarnished, leaving them and those who love them at a loss for what to do. More than 34 million family members care for an older relative for "free," but with costs to them in time, money, jobs, and health. Countless seniors are targeted by scammers and make riskier decisions about care, housing, money, and driving due to cognitive decline. And epidemics of isolation and loneliness make older people unnecessarily vulnerable to all sorts of harm. These problems touch millions of families regardless of class, race or gender. Today, one in ten older Americans is neglected or exploited with devastating results. And the systems supposed to safeguard them--like nursing homes, guardianship, Adult Protective Services, and criminal prosecution--often make problems worse. Weaving first- person accounts, her own unrivaled experience, and shocking investigative reporting across the worlds of medicine, law, finance, social services, caregiving, and policy, MT Connolly exposes a reality that has been long hidden--and sometimes actively covered up. But things are not hopeless. Along with diagnosing the ailments, she gives readers better tools to navigate the many challenges of aging--whether adult children caring for aging parents, policy-makers trying to do the right thing, or, should we be so lucky to live to old age, all of us.

Glauber Contessoto gambles his life savings on a joke cryptocurrency. Two months later, he becomes “The Dogecoin Millionaire” and an internet legend. While it might seem easy to get rich online, it’s even easier to lose it all.

Available on Kanopy.

A direct, incisive guide for consumers to know how to protect and handle their money in the face of a financial crisis There are always going to be unexpected financial crises in our lives. Whether we're facing an economic recession, a pandemic, a bear market, or energy worries, we have to immediately know what to do with our money. We start to ask: What bills need to be paid first? Should we dip into our savings? Are there better methods to protect a nest egg? Michelle Singletary provides a hands-on guide to all of your debt concerns, credit card issues, cash- flow problems, medical coverage questions, and the dozens of other common financial issues that crop up with all of us when money suddenly becomes tight.

A big-hearted, no-bullshit memoir from TikTok superstar Madeline Pendleton about her journey from living paycheck to paycheck to creating a multi-million-dollar business that offers a compassionate alternative to capitalism. Imagine a job where you work four days a week and earn as much as the CEO. You also get full benefits, a gym membership, free lunch, and unlimited time off, including mental health days, no questions asked. Hard-won profits don't just end up in the CEO's pocket-they're distributed equally among all employees. The company even buys you your very own car. It sounds too good to be true, but this is the reality at Tunnel Vision, the clothing company that Madeline Pendleton Hansen built from the ground up. Like so many Americans, Madeline used to struggle to make ends meet. Raised by a punk dad and a goth mom in Fresno, California, she spent her teens on the brink of homelessness, relying on the kindness and spare couches of the local punk community to get by. By her twenties, she was drowning in student loans and credit card debt, with no relief in sight. Madeline felt the intense toll that financial stress was taking on her and her loved ones, and she was sick of her bosses treating her as disposable-she knew there must be a better way. After years of living broke, Madeline decided to study the rules of capitalism, the game everyone is forced to play. She used what she learned to build a new kind of business, one rooted in an ethos of community care. Now, Madeline is paying it forward by sharing her path to success on her terms, plus no-nonsense life and money advice: How do you build credit? How do you negotiate higher pay? How do you build a better world? Millennials and Gen Zers like Madeline are facing an unprecedented financial reality: Stagnant wages, skyrocketing housing costs, a student debt crisis. I Survived Capitalism is essential reading for anyone searching for hope and stability in an unjust world.