5 books to read before (or alongside) Cashfulness
No tool is born from nothing.
Cashfulness is the child of years of reading, of mistakes of my own, of insights borrowed from people who said intelligent things about money long before me.
I thought it was honest to tell you where those ideas come from.
What follows is not a ranking. It isn't a set of reviews either. It's a reasoned bibliography: five books, and for each one the reason it matters and which piece of Cashfulness's thinking it lights up.
One disclosure I don't want to hide from you: one of the five I wrote myself. It's the fifth. You'll find it in its place, told with the same measure as the other four — no more, no less.
I put it there because it's consistent with the others, not because it's mine.
And if you read zero of these five books, that's fine too: I tried to write each entry so it leaves you with a useful idea even without opening the book.
1. George S. Clason — The Richest Man in Babylon (1926)
Let's start with the oldest, and the simplest.
It's a collection of parables first published from 1926 by George Clason, an American. The stories are set in ancient Babylon: the main character is Arkad, the richest man in the city, explaining to whoever asks how he got there.
The core idea is a single one, and it has entered everyday language: pay yourself first.
Before rent, before groceries, before the bills, set aside a fixed share of what comes in — the book says a tenth. That share is yours, and it's untouchable. Everything else is what you live on.
Clason adds a second rule, less quoted but just as important: that share mustn't sit still. It has to be put to work, prudently, so it produces in turn — and it has to be protected from anyone promising easy gains.
Saving is only the first step. The second is not letting what you've saved be taken away from you.
Put like that it sounds obvious. It isn't: almost no one actually does it, because almost no one has a system that makes it automatic.
And this is where the book touches Cashfulness.
The discipline Clason talks about isn't deprivation. It's order. It doesn't ask you to give something up: it asks you to put things in the right sequence.
The problem is that order, if it depends on willpower every month, sooner or later breaks. Recording regularly inside Cashfulness exists precisely to take order out of willpower's hands: you see it, it's there, it tells you on its own whether you're keeping the rule or not.
And that share, growing, and at some point starting to produce, is the first brick of independence: in Cashfulness you watch it rise entry by entry, without having to imagine it.
An honest caveat: the parable form has aged, and the style sounds old, at times solemn.
Don't read it for the style. Read it — or just remember it from here — for the principle: a share, before everything else, always.
2. Vicki Robin & Joe Dominguez — Your Money or Your Life
Clason teaches you to put things in order. The next book asks what that order is for.
Your Money or Your Life is an American book, published in the early 1990s, written by Vicki Robin and Joe Dominguez. It's one of the texts that founded conscious finance, long before the phrase became fashionable.
Its core idea is a sentence that, once read, is hard to forget: money is life energy.
Every euro you spend is time of your life you traded to earn it. It's not an abstraction: it's the number of real hours you gave in exchange for that money.
From there comes the question the book puts in your hands: is this thing I'm buying worth the hours of life it cost me?
The book also does a precise calculation for you: what an hour of your work is really worth, once you subtract everything the work costs you just to exist — the commute, the clothes, the stress to shake off. Almost always it's lower than you think.
And it shows you there's a point — they call it "enough" — beyond which spending more doesn't make you happier. The point is to recognise it, not to drift past it.
If you have in mind the sentence underneath Cashfulness — money is a tool to buy time and freedom — here you find it almost word for word, but turned into a method.
It's the most direct bridge in this whole list.
Every expense is hours of your life. Your net worth — what we call your fix in Cashfulness — tells you how many hours you've already bought back, and how close you are to the point where you no longer have to trade any.
The caveat: the book is very US-centred, on taxes, pensions and on investment advice now dated in its practical details.
The thinking, though, holds intact. You just have to translate the examples into your own country and your own present — the underlying idea doesn't age.
3. Beppe Scienza — Il risparmio tradito
Robin and Dominguez ask you what money is for. Beppe Scienza warns you about who profits when you don't ask.
It's an Italian book (the title means, roughly, Savings Betrayed), written by a mathematician at the University of Turin who has spent years looking critically at the managed-savings industry.
The core idea is uncomfortable: a large part of that industry works, in practice, against the saver.
Fees that erode returns in silence. Products built to be opaque. The bank counter offering what's convenient for whoever sells it to you, not for you.
A concrete example, no names: two products that invest in the exact same things can leave you, after twenty years, tens of thousands of euros apart — purely because of an annual fee that looked small. The small percentage, compounded over time, is not small.
The lesson you take home, even without reading the book, is a single one and it holds forever: distrust anyone who sells you a product dressed up as advice.
There is a practical defence, and it's simple: always ask how much it costs you, in euros and per year, everything included. If the answer is vague, the vagueness is already an answer.
This is the bridge to Cashfulness, and it's a bridge made of absence.
Cashfulness has no financial products to push on you. It takes no commission on what you do with your money, doesn't steer you toward a fund, has no hidden interest in the number you see.
It shows you your numbers, and nothing else. A neutral tool is needed precisely because everything Scienza describes exists.
Another name far more popular on these themes, Robert Kiyosaki, is not on this list: we wrote about him separately, in a dedicated article on this blog, and there we explain why.
The caveat, owed: Scienza's tone is polemical, at times cutting.
Take it for what it is — a critical prod that trains the right kind of distrust, not a final verdict on every single product or person. The value is the way of looking it leaves you with, not every particular judgement.
4. Seneca — On the Shortness of Life (De brevitate vitae)
Scienza warns you about who wastes your money. Seneca reminds you what you're really wasting.
It's a moral essay by the Latin philosopher Seneca, written almost two thousand years ago. It never talks about money. It talks about time.
The core idea overturns the way we usually complain: it's not true that we have little time — it's true that we waste a great deal of it.
The problem isn't the quantity of life, but the attention with which we spend it.
Seneca draws a distinction we always confuse: a long life and a lived life are not the same thing. The person who's always extremely busy, he writes, is often the one who has lived the least — because they never stopped long enough to notice where they were going.
Seneca makes an observation that, twenty centuries later, still stings: we defend our money tooth and nail, and let anyone take away our time — the one thing that, unlike money, does not come back.
It's the only book on this list that has nothing to do with money. And that's exactly why it lights money up better than the others.
Because managing money is, in the end, managing the time that money buys you.
The whole point of Cashfulness — knowing where you are, without having to think about it constantly — exists for this: less attention spent worrying about money, more life left to life. Money put in order is time you take back.
It's the same gesture Seneca recommends for time: every so often, stop and look at where it's going. Once a week, with the numbers in front of you, is exactly that stopping.
Here no caveat is needed.
There's nothing to bring up to date, nothing dated to translate. A text that holds two thousand years on doesn't need me to defend it.
Read it. It's short, and no finance book will tell you this thing with the same sharpness.
5. Vittorio Giusti — Strategie per la Finanza Personale
And we reach the fifth. The one I wrote.
I'll say it plainly, no detours: it's mine, and for exactly that reason I won't sing its praises. I put it on this list because it's consistent with the other four, not because it carries my name. (The title means Personal Finance Strategies; the book is in Italian.)
It's a practical personal-finance book. It explains, step by step and with concrete examples, how to bring into household management the same rigour of double-entry bookkeeping — the technique companies have used to keep their books balanced for centuries.
It starts from zero: how to build a chart of accounts for a household, how to record what comes in and what goes out, how to read the result without being a bookkeeper. Even if you never buy the book, the idea to take home is this: the method businesses use works, identically, for a household too.
There's a point where I have to be completely transparent with you.
In the book I recommend, as the operational tool, GNUCash: free, open-source double-entry accounting software, for the desktop computer. It's an excellent application — powerful, solid, and it costs nothing.
So why did I build Cashfulness?
Because when I wrote that book, Cashfulness didn't exist yet. GNUCash was — and still is — the serious available choice, and I recommended it in good faith.
The point I care about getting across clearly is this: all the book's reasoning stays valid. In fact, with Cashfulness it holds all the more.
The book hasn't aged. What changes, for the better, is the recommended tool — not the thinking underneath it.
Cashfulness inherits the same double-entry rigour, but it's much simpler, more modern and more functional than GNUCash, and built for people who aren't accountants.
Put in one line: if you read the book today, mentally replace GNUCash with Cashfulness. The method is identical, the experience much simpler.
The book is available on Amazon.
The thread that holds them together
Five very different books. An American from the 1920s, two authors of conscious finance, a polemical Italian mathematician, a Latin philosopher, and me.
And yet, if you line them up, they all say the same thing from different angles.
Clason: put things in order, so money works for you and not you for it.
Robin and Dominguez: that money is time of your life, treat it as such.
Scienza: don't let others turn your means into their end.
Seneca: the resource that's truly scarce isn't money, it's time.
And the fifth, mine, tries to put all of this into a method you can apply in your own home.
The thread is a single one: money is a tool to buy time and freedom — not a dream to chase, nor an enemy to fight.
All five, each in its own way, take money out of the centre of the scene and put your life back there.
That's why Cashfulness asks you for a few minutes, not your day: the method is there to make you think about money less, not more.
It is, if you want, the place where these ideas stop being reading and become daily practice. The beta is opening — no rush, whenever you feel like it.
— Vittorio