[FYI this post contains a bunch of links to books you can buy on Amazon. None of them are affiliate links. I do not get paid if you click them – I just want you to have good information and be setup for life.]
Consumer and student debt is a super hot topic these days.
Wrap that into what you get if you go to a for-profit trade school (I’m looking at you, The Art Institute, Los Angeles Film School, Full Sail University, etc.) and how much money that costs compared to what you get out of it…
To say it’s easy to make a living – much less a prosperous one as a creative – is simply not true. It takes a considerable amount of work, regardless of if you’re fully employed by a company or you’re doing your own thing.
The first chapter of Quit Aspiring, if you were to pick it up, hits you over the head with this brutally. Not only general money talk but “what do you want out of life and can you get that by doing game audio?” talk.
Why?
Because money itself isn’t easy to manage. Add a creative career with no promise of stability to that and if you don’t educate yourself – you could be in for a world of hurt.
So today’s post is a simple list of books for you. These are the books that taught me the basics of money management and financial planning when quite literally nobody else helped or taught me.
I had no idea what to charge (I made a hair over $20k one year and thought I was doing great).
I had no idea how to do taxes (My TurboTax income tax return paid a month’s rent for me once… because I didn’t have the money coming in)
I couldn’t afford a car, could barely make the minimum payments on my student loans, and was afraid of getting a credit card because it would enable me to get into further consumer debt.
Seriously – I was a joke, and I had no idea what I was doing.
Now, I’ve paid off around $50k in debt between student loans and my car. I have credit cards, and pay off their balances in full every month. My family has an emergency savings (which helps when through nobody’s fault your contract with a AAA game company ends early). We also have a good chunk put away for retirement, a house down payment, and a 2nd car.
All of that was only possible due to reading, educating myself, and experimenting with the information enclosed. Even if both my wife and I made six figure incomes individually – I previously lacked so much financial sense that we still somehow would’ve wasted it.
So if you’re shaking in your boots every time you log in to your bank account (I used to have panic attacks such that I couldn’t even enter my login) and you want to get past that – here’s what I’ve got for you.
Handling Debt
The Total Money Makeover by Dave Ramsey
If you’ve searched anything about finances, I’m not sure how you wouldn’t come across this book. Ramsey is such a huge name now that missing him is nearly impossible.
His voice and public image can be super cheesy, yes. His ardent fans can be completely annoying. He can come off incredibly stingy.
But the content 100% works, don’t knock it until you try it.
Dave’s horribly titled book is the first thing that started my process to get out of debt. I paid off my first $1,000 student loan (which seemed like an impossible mountain of money at the time) through following his principles. I cut out excess spending, and got a lucky break when my rent price dropped due to construction. I piled all the extra money onto that first $1,000 and paid it off.
I will never forget the feeling of getting the PAID IN FULL notice in the mail. I still have every one I’ve gotten. I still sit back in awe each time it happens.
So if you’re neck deep in debt, and you don’t want to be paying other people/interests in order to live for the rest of your life – go buy the book. The $12 the Kindle copy currently costs will end up paying for itself multitudes of times over.
Debt, Credit, and Financial Strategy
I Will Teach You To Be Rich by Ramit Sethi
Again – you nearly have to be living under a rock now if you haven’t heard of Ramit Sethi.
I can’t praise this book enough for helping me set up a variety of financial strategies that I’ve done for so long now, I don’t even think about. For example…
90% of my bills automatically pay themselves – I look at them once a month.
I negated a rent increase during the past year because of content from the book.
I never ever pay any fees on anything, even late fees, especially on credit cards.
I can negotiate the price down of nearly any recurring payment – like phone, cable, and storage bills that routinely go up without you noticing.
I even had the gall to call my cable provider and ask them to give me one specific channel from a tier I don’t have without making me pay for the full tier because of this book. I didn’t win, but I almost did – customer service was tripping over themselves trying to figure out a way to do it.
The biggest thing I can tell you that you’ll get walking away from Ramit’s book is empowerment.
I used to be scared of money – literally. I had no idea how I would pay for bills, I wasn’t making enough, etc. Now, my money works for me. I got that from applying Ramit’s principles after I had begun using Dave Ramsey’s method of getting out of debt.
Now, I hardly even have to look at money or think about it.
Again – just like Dave’s book – buying a copy of this will cause it to pay for itself if you read it. If you call your phone or credit company and negotiate the price of a bill or fee, it will save you more than $8 (the current Kindle price). Do that twice, and the book has become an investment that is actively making you money.
Taxes and Business Creation
My friend Akash Thakkar pointed me to the next and final author here. He has a bunch of incredible books – some I’ve read and some I’m passing on to you anyway. Here’s the list:
Independent Contractor, Sole Proprietor, and LLC Taxes Explained in 100 Pages or Less by Mike Piper
Taxes Made Simple: Income Taxes Explained in 100 Pages or Less by Mike Piper
LLC vs S-Corp vs C-Corp Explained in 100 Pages or Less by Mike Piper
Ok first – ALL OF THESE BOOKS ARE $5 – if you cannot or refuse to buy them because you don’t have the money, oh my gosh please get your priorities straight.
Second, apologies to the non-US folks, obviously all of the ones in the list above are explicitly related to US business and tax advice. I hardly know what I’m talking about anyway – but I certainly have no idea about finances in countries outside my own.
Third, go search “Mike Piper” in Amazon. He’s got a ton more small books than these on all sorts of interesting financial related subjects. You might imagine money to be tedious or boring – but when someone is willing and able to make me understand complicated, dry subjects in 100 pages or less… you’ve got my attention.
The most awesome thing about these books is that they fulfill a need deep in my mind. I don’t need to explicitly handle all of my own finances (though I do a large chunk of it – or setup a system run by robots), but I must know what the hell is going on with my money. I don’t like putting numbers into an account and saying “well, I guess that works because that’s what I’m supposed to do – right?”
That’s the thing, for example, that gets me on edge every time I use TurboTax. I never quite know if I’m doing my own taxes right, even if they are simple. I have a nagging feeling in the back of my brain that I’ve done it wrong and I’m going to get audited one day and be screwed. It’s likely a completely unfounded fear – but it’s still there!
These books have given me just a solid overview of what business structure works best for me, how to handle a variety of taxes and why, and how to situate myself for retirement. I mean, the guy even has a book called Microeconomics Made Simple. If you put me in a class called that, kill me now, please. But a short book that I know I’m going to learn from and be done with quickly? I’m 100% in.
Go Learn
All together – if you live in the US and bought every single one of the books on the list above, you would spend under $50.
To give you an idea – just with principles from the first two (Ramsey’s and Ramit’s books) I paid off $50k in debt. Now I’m making wise future decisions with Mike Piper’s books – things that set me up for when I’m stuck in game audio unemployment hell and have a family.
So I implore you to at least buy one of the books above and spend some time with it. All of us (myself included still) can do better with our money, or making money. Money isn’t everything – but you will certainly struggle much harder through life if you don’t have a solid grasp on how to make it work for you.
Get to work!
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