Enhancing Your Family’s Long-Term Well-Being: A Beginner’s Guide to Investing

Labor Day has come and gone, the kids are back in school, and those sunny days at the beach are starting to fade into a distant but cherished memory. While your children dive into their English and history textbooks, why not take this opportunity to delve into a topic that could greatly impact your family’s long-term well-being: investing.

For beginners, navigating the vast sea of investment resources can be overwhelming. With over 50,000 results for “investing” on Amazon’s book section alone, finding the right starting point can seem like an impossible task. To save you the time and effort of sifting through countless book reviews, we’ve reached out to financial advisors to find out their top recommendations for clients who are new to investing.

Malissa Marshall, Financial Planner at Soaring Wealth: Rather than recommending books solely focused on investing, there are a few key titles that I encourage my clients to explore. As a financial planner, my approach is to start with the bigger picture – understanding their goals – and then working together to devise strategies that effectively utilize their assets (money, time, and energy) to achieve those goals.

In order to emphasize the importance of staying true to one’s goals, I suggest beginning with Carl Richards’ insightful book, The One-Page Financial Plan. This resource serves as an excellent starting point, offering practical advice on aligning your financial decisions with your core values. For a broader understanding of the role money plays in our lives, Morgan Housel’s masterpiece, The Psychology of Money, provides invaluable insights that challenge conventional wisdom and rethink our relationship with wealth.

As for my own journey, having grown up in poverty, there were two books that profoundly shaped my perspective on money and ultimately led me to become a financial planner: Thomas Stanley’s The Millionaire Next Door and Robert Kiyosaki’s Rich Dad Poor Dad. Both of these books, though different in their approaches, taught me that wealth is not simply handed down from above (although for some fortunate individuals, it may seem that way). Rather, true wealth is the result of a lifetime of deliberate choices and habits. Furthermore, they highlight the stark differences between real wealth and the mere appearance of it.

By immersing yourself in these carefully chosen resources, you can gain the knowledge and perspective needed to embark on your investing journey. Remember, investing is not a sprint but a marathon, where your financial decisions today can pave the way for a brighter future filled with abundance and contentment.

Investing Books for Beginners

Richard Daskin, President, RSD Advisors

The Little Book of Common Sense Investing: The Only Way to Guarantee Your Fair Share of Stock Market Returns, by Jack Bogle, is a really good place to start. Bogle is the founder of Vanguard and a huge proponent of index investing. Bogle’s view on the markets is fundamental to investing today, even if you aren’t a strict follower of his philosophy. As a new investor you could do a lot worse than to follow his advice.

Frank Pare, President PF Wealth Management Group

I usually rely on David Bach’s The Automatic Millionaire as a go-to source. The reason is that David integrates financial planning—and investing—within a “set-it-and-forget-it” framework. Plus, his advice is practical and easy to understand regardless of how much money a person might have.

Chip Munn, CEO of Signature Wealth Strategies

Investing is easy. It’s staying invested that can be hard. Many studies show that missing the best handful of days of market performance over any given period can dramatically impact overall returns, so it’s imperative that we prepare clients to stay invested for the long term. If I were going to recommend a book to the layman that I believe would lead to their long-term success, it would be Peaks and Valleys, by Spencer Johnson. In this business parable, the protagonist learns that the peaks and valleys in life are natural and it’s important to find balance between appreciating the peaks when you’re there and accepting the valleys as part of the journey. I can’t think of a better lesson for anyone wanting to ride the “emotional roller coaster” of investing successfully.

Share your favorite investing books for beginners in the comments below.