- The Reading Life
- Posts
- 10 Books to Help You Make FAST Financial Progress
10 Books to Help You Make FAST Financial Progress
Matt Karamazov
August 26, 2025 • Estimated Reading Time: 39 minutes
One of the authors I’m going to introduce you tonight once wrote that “Get rich quick exists. Get rich easy does not.”
There’s some truth to that (and his books changed my life), but I’ve also found that when it comes to wealth-building, even small changes in your current trajectory can lead to major differences in where you end up.
For example, even just finding a way to earn an extra $300 per month, reduce your spending by $300 per month, and gathering your financial records all in one place can give you wonderful peace of mind and a sense of forward momentum.
You don’t have to get rich right away. You can start where you are, with what you have, and use those fast, early wins as extra motivation to make other, more sweeping improvements in your financial situation over time.
Wherever you’re starting from, there are plenty of ways to make fast, small, yet meaningful progress toward your financial goals, and tonight’s 10 books will help.
Some of them can also help you make astounding progress in a relatively short period of time and get seriously rich (book #6 comes to mind), but virtually everyone can find plenty in these pages to meaningfully improve their financial picture.
Before we get into the books though, I want to introduce you to my friend Josh Spector, and recommend his newsletter, which is called For the Interested.
Josh’s one-paragraph newsletter gives you simple, proven ways to get more revenue and attention from your content based on how others have done so, and more than 32,000 people (including me!) look forward to reading it every time.
Justin Welsh even said it’s one of his favorite newsletters, and I’d have to agree! But check it out for yourself and see what you think.
When you join, you also get the chance to get one of his Skill Sessions for free, which are one-hour video presentations where he teaches you how to do one specific thing that will help you get more clients from your content.
And now, before our coffees get hold, let’s hit the books!
I actually added something different today, and so what you’ll find underneath each book summary is a difficulty rating, and a short explanation of why you might want to read it.
Tonight, Inside The Reading Life, We’ve Got:
“Furthermore, when there is great injustice, we should not use that fact as an excuse for childish and undisciplined behavior. Injustice should be greeted with protest and careful, courageous strategic action. But the end goal must always remain in view: as King said so simply: ‘A world where men and women can live together.’”
“The highest form of wealth is the ability to wake up every morning and say, 'I can do whatever I want today.'"
Inside my private business mastermind, Creator Launch Academy, we’re tackling one nonfiction book per month and implementing its lessons inside our businesses.
This month’s book is The Psychology of Money, by Morgan Housel, a great book about the crazy things we all do with money, why we do them, and how we can (slowly, eventually) learn to behave differently. Click here to claim your free trial, and join our business book club for educational content creators!
After achieving my (somewhat meaningless) goal of reading 1,000 books before I turned 30, I set a new (also meaningless but cool) goal of reading 10,000 books. As of today, I’ve read exactly 1,407 books, including 55 books so far this year, and if you’re interested, here’s my full Reading List.
“Whenever the rat race marginalizes time and treats it as a mathematical variable for financial freedom, you’re being propagandized.”
This book blasphemes against the current economic religion of the world, which tries to convince people that it’s a good idea to work and slave away at jobs they hate, just so they can maybe, hopefully be free fifty years later when – and if – their investments mature, and they can enjoy their money from the safety of the nursing home.
That sounds like a waste of a perfectly joyous life to me, and M.J. DeMarco teaches how we can avoid that fate by starting a business and taking advantage of the internet gold rush that we’re currently experiencing.
That being said, one of the things I appreciate about him so much is that he refuses to peddle easy answers and impossible guarantees. He says straight up that starting a business will be the hardest thing you ever do; growing it will be the second.
So it’s obviously not for everyone, and I would never try to tell anyone that there’s something “wrong” with working a regular 9-5 job for your entire life. Some regular jobs are profoundly fulfilling, beneficial to society, and totally necessary for its proper functioning. However, if that’s not for you, then there’s another way.
A few of DeMarco’s ideas make his books worth reading a hundred times over. The first is about probability, and about how we are always stacking the odds either for or against ourselves.
Starting and growing a business carries a ton of risk, of course, but you stack probability in your favor by getting started in the first place, seeking out mentors and role models, experimenting and trying to find out what works and what doesn’t, taking enough shots and trying again and again, and applying the best ideas that the best business minds that have come before us have figured out and implemented in their own businesses.
Doing all these things and more makes business less “risky,” and increases our chances of success.
Another idea is his CENTS framework, which you can use to determine if the probability gods are likely to shine upon you. The letters stand for Control, Entry, Need, Time, and Scale, and if you have all these factors on your side, then your business is much more likely to take off.
If you don’t Control your business, or if there’s no barrier to Entry for your competitors, for example, then you’re in for a tough slog.
Another spectacular idea is that of increasing your value to society by either scale or magnitude. Scale is part of the CENTS framework, and if you can get your product into the hands of more customers you’re going to do much better financially, obviously.
But if you improve the lives of people at a greater magnitude, then you’re also rewarded extremely well financially.
You can make a million people’s lives a little tiny bit better and have them each pay you a dollar (say, for example, a candy bar that people enjoy), and/or you can create a ton of value for a smaller number of people. Think, for example, a doctor saving a person’s life.
I honestly can’t recommend DeMarco’s books highly enough, and if you’re at all entrepreneurially-minded, then they are absolute must-reads.
Difficulty Rating: Easy
Why Read It: MJ DeMarco gives you a step-by-step plan to replace your 9-5, with more than 100 tactics and strategies, brought to life through a fictionalized story of a husband and wife implementing them in real time.
“Maximizing your fulfillment from experiences – by planning how you will spend your time and money to achieve the biggest peaks you can with the resources you have – is how you maximize your life.”
Die with Zero is about maximizing your life experiences, which means balancing time, money, and health, throughout your lifespan.
Sometimes it makes sense to trade time for money, but ruining your health for the sake of money is usually a horrible investment!
We all know how important money is to our well-being and happiness, but many of us work too hard at jobs we hate to make money that we may never get to spend!
That’s crazy!
At the end of our lives, all we have are our memories, and as Perkins notes, these memories pay dividends every time we look back on them!
So, it usually makes sense to spend money on unforgettable experiences, regardless of whether you can “afford” them at the time.
Before we die, none of us will ever regret not spending more time at the office, but we will regret all those priceless memories we never formed, and all those bold leaps we never took.
Difficulty Rating: Easy
Why Read It: The book gives you a new way to think about your three greatest resources - time, money, and health - and helps you think through ways you can optimize your deployment of each throughout your lifespan.
“Everything worth pursuing has less than 100% odds of succeeding.”
Out of nowhere, here came this finance book from a somewhat obscure author that completely changed how I think about money and solidified some core concepts with which I was already familiar. It’s one of the most useful personal finance books I’ve ever read, and unsurprisingly, it blew up when it first came out.
As you can guess from the title, The Psychology of Money deals with the personal, emotional side of money and the role it plays in our individual lives.
Money is completely neutral; it will change aspect and feel depending on whoever it is that’s thinking about it, worrying about it, or pursuing it. Money doesn’t care about anything we’re feeling, it just responds to how we feel about it. That sounds more woo-woo than I meant it to sound, but the book is actually very practical.
It’s similar in some ways to Tim Ferriss’s instant classic, The Four-Hour Workweek, especially the discussion of how critical it is to spend money to buy time, and how everyone’s financial strategy makes sense to them, regardless of how crazy it may look on the outside.
No one is crazy, says Housel. We just bring our whole psychology to the topic of money, and the result turns out to be a real circus! If we can learn to distance ourselves from our emotions a little bit and put things in perspective, we can change our entire relationship to money and bring a little sanity and peace to our financial lives.
Difficulty Rating: Easy
Why Read It: The book is fast-paced and engaging, while also being extremely helpful when it comes to thinking about money in the proper way and working with our emotions instead of against them.
“Financial independence is freedom from the fog, fear, and fanaticism so many of us feel about money. If this sounds like peace of mind, it is. Fiscal bliss. And if this sounds as unattainable as being rich, it isn’t.”
I wasn’t about to read another personal finance book. My money is generally under control, and my life is generally under control, but I still gained a ton of insight from this book. So I can only imagine that someone whose financial situation is considerably worse could benefit a ton from reading it.
Having flown through it and taken great notes, I can highly recommend it. And it’s sold close to a million copies, so it definitely resonates with a diverse crowd of people.
One major concept that emerges from the book is the idea of monitoring your “life energy” rather than just money.
A lot goes into earning money – basically every minute and every dollar that you spend before, at, or after work that somehow involves your work – and all that time and effort is your life. So you should at least make an effort to track where all that life energy is going!
The best way to manage your time is to figure out how you’re spending it now, and basically the same applies to money. Budgets may be boring, but they are lifesavers in the right hands.
The system outlined in the book is very practical, very efficient, and very helpful – I almost can’t imagine someone succeeding with money who doesn’t do and understand something similar to what the authors suggest.
Underneath it all, however, is your relationship with money – how much time you spend thinking about it, your feelings toward it, what you’re willing to do to get it under control. At one point, the authors ask: If you were money, would you hang out with you? Fair question.
So while this is not a “serious” personal finance book, it’s incredibly sincere. The practical and the pragmatic is mixed with the earnest and the heartfelt, and combined, the strategies, mindsets, and insights to be gained within this book make up time very well spent.
Difficulty Rating: Easy
Why Read It: The book is perfect for people who may be overwhelmed by their financial situation but who don’t want to be talked down to by big-time investors or shamed into thinking they should be further ahead financially than they are now.
“If you intend to achieve financial freedom, you are going to have to think differently. It starts by recognizing that debt should not be considered normal. It should be recognized as the vicious, pernicious destroyer of wealth-building potential it truly is. It has no place in your financial life.”
This is one of the better investing books out there (out of approximately eight hundred trillion of them ), and it comes with a very easy-to-follow plan for building wealth over time: Spend less than you earn. Invest the surplus. Avoid debt. And that’s pretty much it. Super simple and effective, but how many people try to overcomplicate everything?
Collins is a personal finance blogger who has built up an exceptionally loyal audience over the years, and he just comes across as a relatively “normal” guy – someone who would invite you over for a barbecue and you’d be excited about going – who actually cares about people, wants them to be provided for financially, and to receive the best information on how best to actually do that.
The book itself goes a bit deeper into his personal philosophy as well, which is fundamentally about freedom. I can say from personal experience that most people just don’t have anyone in their financial lives who cares about them as much as Collins does about his readers. It’s also astonishing to me how many people think freedom is so much further away than it actually is.
Of course, freedom is far away if you choose to remain financially illiterate and don’t take time to learn how the stock market works, what the difference is between an index fund and a mutual fund, what an IRA is, and all this basic financial literacy stuff that he covers in this book. It’s a good refresher course, even for people like me who knew much of this stuff going in. It never hurts to stay up to date and renew your knowledge.
You really can’t go wrong with this one, and it’s full of awesome advice that I’d feel comfortable giving myself: take the initiative and learn about how money works; prioritize putting some money away into investment vehicles that are going to take you to financial freedom over the long term; don’t buy silly stupid shit that you won’t care about next month, when instead you could invest that money and buy your freedom for a lifetime. You know, that kinda stuff!
Difficulty Rating: Easy
Why Read It: Collins presents a dead-simple plan to start eliminating debt and bolstering your savings and investments, and he does it in the most supportive and freedom-loving way possible.
“If I had my time again, knowing what I know today, I would dedicate myself to making just enough to live comfortably (say $60 or $80 million), as quickly as I could - hopefully by the time I was thirty-five years old. I would then cash out immediately and retire to write poetry and plant trees.”
From college dropout to centimillionaire publishing magnate, all the while harboring an immense love and talent for poetry and the written word, Felix Dennis certainly has the credentials to write a book like this.
But there’s also something tragic about the overall tone of How to Get Rich - tinged with regret as it is - and he actually spends a fairly large portion of the book trying to convince you not to get rich.
It can be extremely difficult, it’s uncertain, it takes a long time, it can ruin your relationships, alienate you from the people you work with, and on and on. He speaks from personal experience, having amassed personal wealth in the area between $600–900M (rich people know how much money they have, but wealthy people are never entirely sure), and you get the sense that he’s suffered all those losses and more.
In fact, he straight up tells you as much, and interspersed with all this great advice about running companies and amassing wealth, he keeps coming back to the question of “Do you really want to do this?” The answer is non-obvious and shouldn’t be rushed. Read this book first and ask yourself whether you’re willing to pay the price he paid.
All told, this is one of the very best books I read in 2023, and probably one of my favorites of all time. I learned a tremendous amount about growing and running a profitable business, but it’s a very special book for many other reasons as well, and one that I’ll not soon forget.
Difficulty Rating: Medium
Why Read It: Felix Dennis doesn’t sugarcoat anything. He doesn’t pretend to be anything than what he is, and he says the quiet part out loud about money, what it’s good for, what it’s not, and how to get more of it.
“Spend as much time investigating the investment as you spent earning the money you are thinking of investing. Fast financial decisions are usually poor financial decisions.”
Habits can actually be exciting if you start thinking about them in the right way. Most people, and most books, make habits boring, but they certainly don't have to be.
Instead of thinking about all the routine, the deprivation, the mundane repetition of basic actions, think about the freedom and the success that will come into your life as a result of embracing the habits of the world's most successful people. That's what Brian Tracy's book will help you do.
All these simple, seemingly inconsequential things you're going to be doing day to day may seem like they're not having much of an effect, but then the power of compounding takes over, and you start to reap the inevitable results of your great habits, until eventually you're going to wish you started ten years ago.
Don't think about the act of sitting in place for hours on end over the course of several months; think instead of the calm, clarity, and focus that your meditation habit will bring into your life.
Don't think about the deprivation of saving 10% of your income and how you won't be able to afford to buy that 5th drink at the bar on Saturday; think instead about all the money that your money will make in the future, and how, instead of needing that drink now to be happy, your happiness will come from both living in the moment and looking forward to a richer future.
I'm sure you could come up with numerous additional examples yourself, but the main thrust of Tracy's argument here is that there is a direct link between the habits you choose to adopt and the results that you achieve in every single area of your life.
Even more importantly, you have direct control over the habits that you choose to adopt, and you have direct control - or at least a ton of influence - over the future course of your life.
Your past doesn't have to define your present or your future. You can make different choices today, and those choices will directly influence every single one of your tomorrows.
Successful people have ‘success habits’, and unsuccessful people do not. That's the reality. Yes, we absolutely start off in different places in life, but we can make one hell of a lot of progress, starting from the very day when we decide to consciously direct the course of our own lives by taking full and complete responsibility for the habits we perform on a daily basis.
All habits are learned as the result of practice and repetition, and you can learn any habit that you believe is either necessary or desirable. As Brian Tracy says, just as your good habits are responsible for most of your success and happiness today, your bad habits are responsible for most of your problems and frustrations. The key is to realize that you have learned your bad habits, and that they can be unlearned as well.
These habits are easy to do, but they're also easy not to do. That's why we have to be intentional about building great habits and removing negative ones. It's rarely going to happen by accident. Taking responsibility is like placing both hands on the steering wheel of your own life, and that's where successful habit formation begins.
Yes, the details matter too, like doing higher-quality work than that for which you are paid, exercising both your mind and body every day, writing out clear goals and then executing on them, working the whole time you're at work, spending less than you make and then investing the difference...but what it all comes down to is your commitment to performing the success habits that your Future Self will thank you for.
Difficulty Rating: Easy
Why Read It: Brian Tracy places a focus on personal development, which almost inevitably leads to financial independence. It’s all practical stuff that most anybody can do, but it’ll make a big difference if you actually do it.
“The most important factor in achieving great financial success is not the money. It is the kind of person you have to become to earn that money and then hold on to it.”
I don’t believe that anyone is “self-made.” We exist in a community of others, and literally every single person who has ever achieved anything has had help. From parents, friends, their fans, the world at large.
That being said, some people are absolutely more self-made than others, and it turns out they actually do have different habits, exhibit different behaviors, and think different thoughts than people who are less successful.
This book examines what those “more” self-made individuals have in common, and Brian Tracy wrote it, so you know pretty much what you’re getting. Tracy’s been with me for a decade, and I owe him a lot with respect to the level of success I’ve been able to achieve so far.
He knows what he’s talking about, he’s made the study of successful people his life’s work, and there’s a ton of great stuff in here about how you can give yourself the best chance of success as well.
Difficulty Rating: Easy
Why Read It: Same as above. There’s virtually no one in the personal finance/self-improvement genre who’s made a greater positive impact on my life than Brian Tracy.
“Millionaires are Readers: 85 percent of millionaires read two or more books every month and 88 percent read 30 minutes or more each day. What did they read? 51 percent read about history, 55 percent read self-help, 58 percent read biographies of successful people, and 79 percent read educational material.”
This is the updated and expanded second edition of Rich Habits, a classic book that distills what Corley learned after spending 5 years studying 233 wealthy people and 128 poor people. His purpose was to identify what the rich do differently, and the result was this book.
Except in this case, unlike Robert Kiyosaki and his Rich Dad series, the people he learned from actually existed. Nothing against Kiyosaki, by the way! Rich Dad, Poor Dad is great (buy assets, not liabilities!), but Rich Habits is grounded in real observational data about how the wealthy and successful achieved their success, not stories about imaginary mentors.
The framing parable used to set up the book’s insights kind of gets in the way a little bit, but it’s not too bad. If you’re pressed for time, you can safely skip the intro chapters and get right into the habits, but it’s not the worst read! After dozens of pages though, it’s just like, “Jeez man, just tell me the habits already!”
None of these Rich Habits are particularly difficult to install, but as easy they are to do, they’re also easy not to do. Drift through life practicing the Contradictory Habits, and you’ll eventually find yourself broke, stressed, and wondering where it all went wrong.
That’s also not to say that success and prosperity beyond your wildest dreams are guaranteed by practicing these Rich Habits. Rather, it’s more like, by practicing them consistently you stack the probabilities in your favor, increasing the likelihood that you get what you want out of life.
As Corley puts it, you’re inviting “Opportunity Luck” by doing this: stacking up wins, building up positive momentum each and every day until, at some point (again, in the not-too-distant future) you look up and realize that you could have told your own fortune.
Difficulty Rating: Easy
Why Read It: This book gives you a high-level overview of the key habits of wealthy individuals worldwide, and shows you how to join their ranks. The habits themselves don’t take much time or effort to implement, but the benefits are profound.
“Money is plentiful for those who understand the simple laws which govern its acquisition.”
This is an absolute classic personal finance book, full of fantastic advice that consistently gets ignored by those people overspending, racking up credit card debt, failing to invest or save for the future, and just generally doing the opposite of everything laid out in this book. You don’t want to be like everybody else, do you? Then read it!
The framing narrative follows Arkad, the wealthiest man in Babylon, who shares his secrets of prosperity with his friends. Much of it is simple, basic advice, but an incredible number of wealthy, financially successful people credit this book with helping them to get their financial lives in order.
It helped me a tremendous amount personally, and today I patiently invest in assets that generate wealth without my conscious involvement. I spend within my limits (while working to expand my limits), I save for the future, I avoid the consumer traps littered across our society and rammed into our eyes and ears at every turn, and I just generally feel more on top of everything financially. And even if you “know” a lot of this stuff already, it’s true that we need to reminded more than we need to be taught.
Difficulty Rating: Easy
Why Read It: The framing parable is simple to follow and understand, and it gives you a great introduction to some of the most powerful drivers of financial success and wealth accumulation.
Forward this to a friend you think would love this book!
If you were sent this newsletter, click here to subscribe.
To read past editions of The Reading Life, click here.
Click here to recommend The Reading Life on Twitter (X).
OK, that’s it for now…
I’ve got plenty more excellent book recommendations coming your way soon though!
There’s also my YouTube channel, where I publish book reviews, reading updates, and more each week.
And if you want to learn how I’ve built an audience of 160,000+ followers across social media, became a full-time creator, and how I’m rapidly growing my audience and scaling my profits in 2025, join us inside Creator Launch Academy and that’s exactly what I’ll teach you — we’d love to have you in the community!
With that said, I hope you enjoyed this edition of The Reading Life, and enjoy the rest of your day!
Until next time…happy reading!
All the best,
Matt Karamazov
P.S. Whenever you're ready, here are two more ways I can help you:
Educational Content Creators: Book a 1:1 call and I’ll help you hit $5K/month with a plan tailored to your business.
Join Creator Launch Academy, my private business mastermind for educational content creators building real revenue and real freedom.
Reply