The book
Emotional Money
Your financial life is run by feelings you can’t see, written before you could read.
Most money advice is aimed at the logical brain — the part that reads spreadsheets and nods along. But the decisions are made somewhere older and quieter. This is a book about that quieter place: the emotions underneath your financial life, and how understanding them changes everything downstream.
In progress — the first chapter is available to read now
The promise
You’re not bad with money. You’re coded.
Every one of us carries a kind of Financial DNA — a set of unconscious money scripts and emotional patterns laid down in childhood that quietly dictates how we save, spend, borrow and compare. Left invisible, that code runs your life and you call it “just how I am.”
Made conscious, it loses its grip. The arc of this book is the arc of that shift — from feeling driven by money to feeling steady with it. Not a budgeting system. Not a path to riches. A way to feel and understand what’s driving your money, and change it from the inside out.
What’s inside
Twelve chapters, one arc
From naming the code and where it came from, through watching it run in the wild, to learning to feel it differently and finally act.
The Inheritance
Why you’re wired this way
- 01Why Am I Like This?Read free
- 02The Four Money Stories
The Feelings Running the Show
How the code plays out
- 03The Spending Trap
- 04The Comparison Game
- 05The Debt Monster
- 06The House You Can’t Buy
- 07Fear and Greed
- 08Love and Money
- 09The Achievement Treadmill
The Rewrite
From anxiety to agency
- 10How Much Is Enough?
- 11The Reset
- 12Feeling Before Fixing
Who it’s for
If knowing what to do has never been the problem
You know what you “should” do with money, and still don’t do it.
The number in the account never quite settles the feeling in your chest.
You’ve tried the budgets and the apps, and something underneath keeps winning.
You want to understand your money patterns, not just be told to try harder.
The author
Written by David
Emotional Money grew out of twenty years spent sitting across the table from people and their money — and the slow realisation that the problem was almost never the maths. David started Emotional Money as an independent personal project to explore the feelings underneath our financial choices, in plain language and without judgement.
This book is general, educational content about the psychology of money. It is an independent personal project — not affiliated with, endorsed by, or produced on behalf of any employer or licensee — and nothing in it is financial product advice.
When it’s ready
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