Another four or five artists last week asked me how I schedule my own personal finance. Truth is, I read a lot and try to implement what I read. For me, there are at least three books that define personal finance:

The Millionaire Mind

The average millionaire isn’t who you think he is. He’s very unlikely to show up on MTV Cribs (is Cribs even still a thing?). He’s incredibly frugal. He’s monogamous. He has worked in one industry that people didn’t take advantage of at a time when it worked. He’s an immigrant, likely. But he definitely has some habits, first outlined in The Millionaire Next Door (if you need a shorter version for your commute).

The Intelligent Investor

Warren Buffett says this book by Benjamin Graham is still the best book ever written on investing, mainly because it’s made up of simple principles that anyone can follow. If you’re seriously looking at buying individual stocks, you need this one and the one below.

The New Buffettology

This book summarizes Buffett’s own strategy for picking a stock. To be used in conjunction with the one above as you define personal finance for your own household.

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If you want to implement some of those things quickly, I recommend Dave Ramsey’s Financial Peace. Dave, honestly, is a jerk on the air. He also encourages his kids to exercise extreme privilege: his daughter Rachel has no business speaking at conferences and she knows it and he knows it deep down and everyone at any given conference knows it to a cringe-worthy degree. He also tends to encourage greed over generousity like the books above, which I don’t like. All of those caveats aside, he still knows his stuff when it comes to personal finance and getting a cheap, old copy of his kit is an easy way to get started.

BONUS: THE SNOWBALL

If you’re more into narrative, you can learn a whole heck of a lot from the general integrity that Warren Buffett exercised in his life (at least by comparison to other billionaires).  Alice Schroeder’s bio is top-notch.

cover image via BorsheimsJewelry