Tag Archives: personal finance

Financial Literacy for Beginners: A Reading List

One of my goals for this year was to become more financially literate and I decided to use a resource that I often turn to: books! As more of a words person, I typically find any discussion of math and numbers completely boring and hard to grasp. Nevertheless, I endured to find books that would at least grab my attention and keep me focused as I wanted to feel more knowledgeable about my finances. With this list, I hope that at least one of these books will be useful no matter where you are in your own journey with finance and money. This list is not exhaustive by any means (nor do I think it is the best one out there!) but if any of these titles pique your interest, you can follow the links in this post to the VPL catalogue where you can request it for yourself. If there are any books that you especially recommend on the subject of personal finance, please feel free to comment below and let me know what I should read next!

A Canadian’s Guide to Money-Smart Living by Kelley Keehn and Alex Fisher: This book was created between the partnership of a financial educator and CPA Canada. A lot of finance books are written for an American audience so it’s always nice to find something specifically targeting Canadians. This book walks you through all of the basic information you need to learn more about your finances and how personal finances work. Though I read this book more recently than other books on this list, I still learned a lot and I found that the book really explains basic concepts in a succinct and understandable way. It doesn’t necessarily teach you how to budget or the best stocks to invest in but it does teach you all the basic financial concepts so you can get an understanding of where to start and what you need. For example, it covers credit scores, mortgages, insurance (did you know house fraud is a thing?!) and even talks about how to have money conversations with family members. I would recommend it for people who have always felt that they don’t know or understand financial concepts as well as they should.

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