You already know you shouldn’t have bought it. You knew at the time. You bought it anyway, and afterwards you couldn’t entirely explain why.

Most money books tell you what to do. Spend less. Save more. Start earlier. The advice is almost always right and it almost always fails, because knowing what to do was never the problem.

This book is about the layer underneath. Five chapters on why people behave the way they do around money, built on research that has been done properly, some of it over decades, by people who won prizes for it.

You’ll find out which of four money beliefs you absorbed as a child, and which three of them are linked to lower net worth. Why a loss hurts roughly twice as much as an equal gain feels good, and what that costs you every time you hold on too long. Why identical dollars get spent differently depending on where they came from. What the research actually says about money and happiness, after two famous studies contradicted each other and the authors sat down to settle it. And why a raise stops feeling like anything within a few months.

No citations, no footnotes, no wading. Just the findings, in plain language, with yourself in mind.

25 pages. Five chapters. Instant PDF download. Read it in an hour.