TL;DR: If you are starting from zero background and want to work on your personal finance situation, The Index Card is a fantastic place to start.
This book is short and sweet. You can easily read it in a weekend. It intentionally doesn’t cover many advanced topics, but you’ll come away with a solid foundation of the vocabulary and the basic landscape of personal finance. From that point, you can:
- Start executing
- Build up advanced knowledge, additional perspectives, and personal preferences
I think it’s very important to make progress on both fronts at the same time. I found out the hard way that there’s a lot to do. You have to start to make progress. It’s really easy to get overwhelmed by options and areas of focus, so just remember that you can often make basic decisions quickly that you can refine later. This book is a very good guide to those easy defaults.
But I also found it’s important to get multiple opinions on everything, including the contents of this book. So consider it the starting point of an ongoing education.
Read it in physical form, on your phone, or as an audiobook. Whatever works best for you. However you do it, one recommendation I have is to maintain a list action items as you encounter things that are applicable to you.
There are certainly equivalent books to this one, so choose an alternative if you know of one. It’s just that I’ve got nothing bad to say about The Index Card and it really helped to get me started on my financial planning voyage.
Alan, online. 