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📚 Welcome back to The Reading Life!
The main book recommendation I have for you tonight is The Simple Path to Wealth, by JL Collins, which is exactly what it sounds like.
There are many more interesting/useful takeaways from the book than this, but its core message can be broken down into the formula: Spend Less Than You Earn, Invest the Difference, and Avoid Debt.
It’s literally what I did to leave my job as a nightclub bouncer/hospital security guard (after using my night shifts to read 1,000+ books!) and get paid to read books all day like I do now.
I took a more extreme route (owning virtually nothing, cutting my expenses to nearly zero, working flat-out all the time, etc.), but you don’t have to do that, as you’ll see.
My full book notes and summary are below, and for this book, I’ve also written a complete, in-depth breakdown that you can find here.
You know I love nonfiction books, but FICTION is what most reliably changes my life. (Watch on YouTube)
My latest YouTube video is also live, where I explain what fiction can do for you that nonfiction never could.
You know I love nonfiction too! I read plenty of both. It’s just that if you only read nonfiction books, I believe that you’re missing out on sooo much. Besides, sometimes there’s more truth hidden inside one novel than dozens of nonfiction books.
And in case you missed it, here are 10 great book recommendations in one sentence each. That’s also on YouTube.
Now, before our coffees get cold, let’s hit the books!
1. The older I get, the more I realize how this book just absolutely nailed it: The Power of Now, by Eckhart Tolle
2. One of the funniest books I’ve ever read, about the madness of humanity and the end of the world: Cat’s Cradle, by Kurt Vonnegut
3. A pretty solid book about the “third metric” of success: well-being: Thrive, by Arianna Huffington
4. While I don’t think the authors are right about everything (who is?), this book really got me hooked on evolutionary psychology and how it explains much of contemporary society and human behavior: Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters, by Alan Miller and Satoshi Kanazawa
5. An incredible account of the last days of Socrates, where, before his forced suicide, he declared that he would “rather die a thousand deaths than renounce what he knew to be true”: Apology, by Plato
6. A really good book on the power of vulnerability (even if does get a little too “mushy” at parts): Daring Greatly, by Brenee Brown
7. An interesting little book about lying, and whether it’s ever morally/ethically justified: Lying, by Sam Harris
8. A biography of Erich Fromm, the 20th-century psychoanalyst who made a deep impact on my thinking in my twenties and beyond: The Lives of Erich Fromm, by Lawrence Friedman
9. One of my favorite poetry collections of all time (from a contemporary of Rumi): The Gift, by Hafiz
10. A great book about getting what you want in life by breaking the rules that don’t matter: Skip the Line, by James Altucher
Every recommendation here is from my Reading List, which lists every single book I’ve read cover-to-cover since 2014, separated by year. For my complete notes and summaries of each book, click here. Happy reading!
“A quick and easy way I like to measure progress is to ask myself if I am still dealing with the same problems and challenges as I was one year ago.”
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Inside my private business mastermind, Wealth Creators, we’re tackling one nonfiction book per month and implementing its lessons inside our businesses.
This month’s book is Essentialism, by Greg McKeown, a fantastic book about identifying those very few things (in life and work) that are actually worth pursuing, and dropping literally everything else.
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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 1,508 books, including 54 books so far this year, and if you’re interested, here’s my full Reading List.
“Since money is the single most powerful tool we have for navigating this complex world we’ve created, understanding it is critical. If you choose to master it, money becomes a wonderful servant. If you don’t, it will surely master you.”
There are approximately eight hundred gazillion books out there about investing, but this is one of the best ones. It also comes with an extremely easy-to-follow formula for building wealth over time:
Spend less than you earn. Invest the surplus. Avoid debt.
And that's pretty much it. The financial world is notoriously murky and opaque, and much of what goes on there appears to be random, but The Simple Path to Wealth cuts through all the noise and deception and gives you the straight facts.
It's also for people who don't want to invest a ton of time learning everything there is to know about money. Everybody wants financial security and freedom, but most people don't have any interest in becoming financial experts. This book bridges that gap beautifully.
Collins himself is a personal finance blogger who has built up an exceptionally loyal audience over the years, and in these pages, he comes across as an agenda-less, effortlessly helpful neighbor who just wants you to succeed with money and be happy. The kind of guy who would invite you over for a barbeque and would actually make you want to go.
The Simple Path to Wealth goes a bit deeper into his personal philosophy as well, which is fundamentally about freedom. It's about getting this "money" thing handled, and thus expanding the possibilities for your own life.
Speaking of freedom, it strikes me that many people believe that their personal freedom is much further away than it actually is. JL Collins repeatedly dispels this myth on page after page, and by the end of it, you're left with this confidence, this inner knowing, that you can do this.
You can earn your freedom. You can build wealth and reach financial independence, and it's not going to take you until the end of your days to do it.
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.
But more than that, Collins gives you the confidence that you can figure this stuff out; you can make meaningful changes to your financial strategy that will significantly improve your situation; you can do it, and thinking about money doesn't have to take over your whole life.
This book is extremely practical, and you'll learn what, specifically, to invest in (and to avoid) that will give you the greatest chance of building significant wealth over time.
But the overall theme - the main takeaway - is that the stock market is the world's most powerful wealth-building tool, and, over a long-enough time horizon, it always goes up.
Always.
The whole process of reaching financial independence involves five simple steps, which are as follows:
Save Aggressively: This involves paying off most debt as soon as humanly possible, and, where it makes sense, aiming to save 50% or more of your pre-tax income. I know, I know, 50% is a lot. But we're going to discuss how 50% (or something close to it) is a lot more realistic than you might expect.
Invest Strategically: You're going to have to decide for yourself how much risk you'd like to take on (which will determine your specific investment allocation, re: stocks vs. bonds, etc.), and then you're going to buy low-cost index funds such as Vanguard...and then hold them for decades.
Do not pull your money out of the market when stocks start to tank, as they almost inevitably will at least some of the time that you're invested in the stock market. Trying to time the market and pulling out when things get rough (and before the market inevitably recovers) is how people go broke.Be Prepared: You're also going to want to keep some cash on hand for emergencies and to pay for various life events such as home renovations, car repairs, etc. Don't get caught off guard! When you prepare for them beforehand, big emergencies often turn into small inconveniences.
Be Tax-Efficient: This is where the book is most valuable to U.S.-based readers and mind-numbingly boring to non-U.S. readers. But if you live in the United States, you're going to want to fill up all of your tax-advantaged accounts first, and this section will show you exactly how to do that. In the View from the Opposition section below, I link to similar resources for international readers.
Don't Stop: That is until you can afford to live off 4% of your investment portfolio each year. It may take a while, but your wealth accumulation will speed up over time, especially if you're reinvesting the dividends from your investments along the way.
There are plenty of other topics discussed in the book, such as where traditional investing advice goes wrong and what actually works; the inner workings of the stock market and how to avoid being taken for a ride; how to change your investment strategy depending on which season of life you're currently in, how the market is faring, etc.; how fund managers are costing you literally thousands of dollars in extra fees; what financial independence actually looks like, and how to protect it, and so much more.
Most importantly, there's nothing in this book that's beyond your comprehension. You can learn everything you need to know to set yourself up for freedom and independence for life, and it doesn't have to consume your life.
You can spend just a few hours learning the basics of investing, money management, and finance, and then you can begin to apply them immediately to make your entire life better from this day forward. Very few investing books come with that kind of ROI.
See? ROI! We're starting to think like investors already!
Investing legend Warren Buffet once said that unless you figure out how to make money in your sleep, you're going to have to work until you die. The Simple Path to Wealth will help you do precisely that so that going forward, your finances don't limit your possibilities.
Financial independence means that you'll no longer be forced to make decisions based on how little money you have. Instead, the money you accumulate will support the life decisions you're able to make because of the freedom you have.
“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.”
“The market always recovers. Always. And, if someday it really doesn’t, no investment will be safe and none of this financial stuff will matter anyway.”
“Stop thinking about what your money can buy. Start thinking about what your money can earn. And then think about what the money it earns can earn.”
“At 8%, $20,000 earns $1,600 per year. So your $20,000 car actually costs you $21,600. The original $20,000 plus the $1,600 it could have earned. But that’s just in the first year, and you are suffering this opportunity cost every year.
Over the 10 years you might own the car, that’s 10 x $1,600: $16,000. Now your $20,000 car is up to $36,000. That’s really understating things, however. We haven’t even considered what those annual $1,600 chunks could have been earning themselves. And what those earnings could then have been earning. And so on.
Should you not already be depressed enough about all this, remember that the $20,000 is gone forever and so is the $1,600 in lost earnings year after year with no end. At the end of the day, it’s one expensive damn car.”
“Once 4% of your assets can cover your expenses, consider yourself financially independent. Put another way, financial independence = 25x your annual expenses.
That is, if you are living on $20,000, you have reached financial independence with $500,000 invested. If, like our friend Mike Tyson, you are living on $400,000 a month/$4.8 million a year, you’re going to need $120 million.”
“Unlike other kinds of debt, as truly awful as they are, you can never walk away from your student loans. They survive bankruptcy. They will follow you to your grave. Your wages, and even Social Security, can be garnished to pay them. No wonder banks are falling all over themselves to issue this debt.
I am a firm believer in personal responsibility and that debt freely taken on should be faithfully repaid. But the ethics of encouraging 17 and 18-year-olds – who likely have little financial savvy – to almost automatically accept this burden give me serious pause. We have created a generation of indentured servants. It’s hard to see the ethics or benefits in that.”
“I owned my freedom. Freedom to choose when to leave a job and freedom from worry when the choice wasn’t mine.”
“With less effort than choosing an advisor, you can learn to manage your money yourself, with far less cost and better results.”
“Money frees you from doing things you dislike. Since I dislike doing nearly everything, money is handy.”
“As individuals, we only have one obligation to society: To ensure we, and our children, are not a burden to others. The rest is our personal choice. Make your own, and make the world a far more interesting place.”
“Avoid debt. Nothing is worth paying interest to own.”
“The Dow started the last century at 66 and ended at 11,400. How could you lose money during a period like that? A lot of people did because they tried to dance in and out.”
“It’s your money and nobody will care for it better than you. But many will try hard to make it theirs. Don’t let it happen.”
“You’re young, smart, healthy, and tough. By your thirties, you’ll have F-You Money and you should have a blast getting there. Once you’ve got it, it will continue to expand, as will your personal options. Your future is so bright it hurts my eyes to look at it. That’s what I have told and will continue to tell my daughter.
So, if you are also in college, or a few years out, and wanted to know what your kindly old Uncle Jim suggests, there you have it. Like everything we’ve discussed, it is all about expanding your opportunities in life.
If you are a bit more seasoned, don’t despair. It’s never too late. It took me decades to figure this stuff out. Like mine, your road has likely already had more bumps than those who follow this path from the start will endure. But those bumps are in the past.
It is your future that matters and that starts, for all of us, right now.”
“Personally, there is nothing I’d rather buy or own than F-You Money. With it, the world’s possibilities are endless and you are faced with the delicious decision as to what to do with your freedom. The only limits are your imagination and your fears.”
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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 200,000+ followers across social media, became a full-time creator, and how I’m rapidly growing my audience and my profits in 2026, join us inside Wealth Creators 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 three more ways I can help you:
Creators: Book a 1-1 strategy call with me and I’ll show you how to reach $5K/month in revenue by following a custom plan that we’ll build together.
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