Money has never been a focal point in my life. I always recognized that it mattered, but it never sat at the front of my mind the way some other things did: independence, security, meaningful work, and new experiences. My parents raised me to treat money as an enabler of those things rather than as a goal in itself. I absorbed that. For most of my twenties, it served me well enough. However, now I’ve realized I need to better understand the basics of personal finance.
And then, slowly, it stopped serving me.
I’m 31. I’m finishing my second master’s degree. I’ve spent the last few years co-running a small startup, and the latter half of that period without taking a salary. I’m planning to move abroad in the next year or two, probably somewhere in Europe. None of these are choices I regret. But somewhere along the way, I crossed a line. I went from “money matters but doesn’t dominate” to “I’ve genuinely stopped paying attention.” The result, predictably, is that I’m 31 with essentially no savings and no investment account. I have a vague sense that I should probably do something about my finances before life arrives in a new country. Soon, I’ll have a new salary and a whole set of decisions I haven’t thought about yet. And this realization is the starting point for a new journey into understanding finance at a more personal level.
So I’m doing something about it. This post is the first in a series about how I’m learning personal finance from something close to zero. I’m someone who’s comfortable with numbers but has never really thought of money as a system. I just liked keeping track of my income and spending since 2023 with a basic spreadsheet that I created from scratch. While I had a steady salary, I saved, which created approximately a 1.5-year runway. But I came to the end of this runway, past this sadly. I’m writing it in real time, not from the other side of having figured it out. By the end, I’d like to have a coherent financial life. However, we’ll see.
If you’re reading this and your situation looks anything like mine, I’m writing for you. Not because I have answers. But because the version of me who knew nothing wished there were a path to follow that wasn’t either condescending or built around a €401(k) and a stable career path she didn’t have.
The first decision: don’t start with the spreadsheet
This was counterintuitive for me. My instinct is always to build the system first, design the categories, define the inputs, set up tracking, get clean numbers, and only then decide what to do with the data. That instinct has served me well in technical work. But those instincts didn’t always fit with developing new personal finance habits.
The reason is something Morgan Housel argues at length in The Psychology of Money: the math of personal finance is the easy part. Savings rate, compound interest, asset allocation. All of it could fit on a postcard. What actually determines whether someone builds financial stability is not their knowledge but their behavior. And behavior comes from somewhere. From your family, from your relationship to risk and uncertainty, from the quiet stories you tell yourself about what money is for, from your specific anxieties and confidences. If you build a system without first understanding the patterns you’ll bring to it, the system quietly accommodates the patterns. Moreover, you end up with an optimized spreadsheet that reflects exactly the financial life you would have lived anyway.
So I started with the book.
Why this book, for me
I want to be careful here, because I don’t want to sound like I’m endorsing The Psychology of Money as the best book ever written about finance. I’m not. It’s not the deepest book on behavioral economics, I guess. Still, what drew me in most were the ways it touches on different aspects of personal finance in everyday stories.
What it is, though, is the right book for me to start with.
It’s short. It’s organized into twenty short chapters, most of them story-driven and roughly self-contained. You can read it in small bites without losing the thread. In fact, it works less as instruction and more as a mirror; you read someone else’s stories about money, and you start to recognize your own.
It also makes the case, repeatedly and with examples, that quantitative skill alone won’t save you here. I needed to hear that argument before I let myself touch a spreadsheet. The book inoculated me against a mistake I was statistically very likely to make. I might have optimized the wrong layer before I understood what the right layer was. That is a really key step in building better personal finance habits for myself.
I read it in about a week. I’ll write about how I read it, and what light note-taking actually looks like when you’re trying to learn from a book without drowning in your own highlighter in the next post.
Where this leaves me
This is the framing for everything that follows in the series: money was never my focus, and I’m not trying to make it one now. I don’t need it to be the centerpiece of my life. But I do need it to stop being the unattended room in my house. It’s the room I keep walking past, pretending I’ll deal with it later. I’m working through that, one post at a time. If your house has a similar room, I’d love it if you could walk some of this through with me. After all, we’re both on a journey to better personal finance awareness.
Next up: how I read the book and what I actually wrote down while reading.
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