Anti-capitalist personal finance recommended reading

My clients commonly ask me for finance book recommendations, so here are some of my favorites right now:

My favorite 101-level personal finance book:

Finance for the People by Paco de Leon

This book, while not explicitly anti-capitalist, offers a pretty comprehensive education in financial literacy, in a human-first kind of way. Paco does a great job keeping her language accessible, and calling out how white supremacy shows up in our financial systems, while telling you what you need to know to start taking care of your finances.

My favorite book to connect personal finance to activism you can do:

The Financial Activist Playbook by Jasmine Rashid

This book teaches financial literacy on a personal level, and then connects each topic to broader policy issues, so that we can get involved in the activism being done to make things better for all of us. If I had to recommend only one book to you, this would be the one!

My favorite book to question charity and philanthropy:

Decolonizing Wealth by Edgar Villanueva

This book questions how money moves in our capitalist and colonial economy, especially focused on how wealthy people giving some money away is not at all the same as liberation.

My favorite book to understand how things got so bad:

Wealth Supremacy by Marjorie Kelley

This book outlines how our cultural bias toward wealth has created the material conditions we live in today. It’s incredibly eye-opening, which also means it brought up a lot of anger and grief for me as I read it.

Books coming up on my TBR include:

The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap by Mehrsa Baradaran

Vulture Capitalism by Grace Blakeley

Inheritocracy by Eliza Filby