Review #43 - How to Worry Less about Money by John Armstrong

This is a book by the School of Life on money. Every book I've ever read about money (which isn't a vast amount of books) says how to manage money, how to keep track of it so you can afford holidays and cars etc etc. I am great at managing money (I was the FD for my Young Enterprise company) but I still worry about it. This is what this book is for.

This wasn't particularly practical or useful if you are struggling to manage your money. It was oddly philosophical. It talked about relationships with money and how to think about it in a healthy way so you don't hate not having money or fear money. It was a really different way of looking at finance. It was a much "smarter" book than all the other "this-is-how-you-budget" books.

This merges the gap between non-fiction and fiction really well. It's full of little short stories that are used as examples for the main points within the chapters. These made this different to normal non-fiction and really made it stand out from the genre. I do really like little stories in non-fiction.

I did disagree with some concepts that felt like the author was justifying his own lack of wealth. There was one point he made where he said that the satisfaction your job brought you goes down with income, so high income jobs could not be fulfilling. It felt like the author was telling himself that he wasn't well off because he was doing a job that was fulfilling. It made me feel like the rest of the book would be biased and trust it less.

It definitely wasn't aimed at my age group so some parts were really irrelevant because large parts were all about having a job. The other parts were still really good.

The School of Life makes these beautiful books and they look so pretty and they have rounded corners and they're so cool.

Buy it here at TBD