Money Is Weird: A Workbook To Help You Build Awareness, Get Curious, & Feel Better About Money

In *Money Is Weird: A Workbook To Help You Build Awareness, Get Curious, & Feel Better About Money*, financial life strategist Lev Mandel presents a practical personal finance workbook that addresses the emotional and behavioral factors that influence our financial decisions. Rather than focusing on conventional areas of personal finance, such as budgeting, savings, and investing, Mandel's book encourages readers to dig deeper into their relationship with money and examine why they respond to it in certain ways. He emphasizes that for those working through the book, it's okay to skip questions and come back to them when the answers come to mind. Ultimately, the goal of the workbook is to provide readers with the tools they need to make positive changes as they move forward on their financial journey. In terms of why he chose to explore this side of personal finance, he explained, "...one of the things I was doing a lot being a financial advisor, was kind of looking and talking through financial anxiety... I think what was missing was these underlying feelings under the numbers, and I think, as the client work really became more and more focused on understanding how it impacts our financial behavior and just life, I really started to go deeper into how we deal with these feelings and looking at how we might be able to respond better to them so that we can make really important financial decisions. I think it's important to know that when we're feeling fogged up, when we're feeling threatened... it's really hard to make decisions about the future... and so I think starting and working at that ground work of under covering this anxiety or these feelings around money really was something that one, I think I kept seeing more and more, and two, I really enjoyed exploring."

In his book, Mandel coins a new word: "wealthness." For him, wealth is about more than just money — it's a combination of two things that aren't typically associated with money at all. "What I thought was really interesting is that the word wealth... really, at the core of it is... it is well-being and health... and it's been associated with money and now we think of it as wealth management, as money management... but I think really that the core idea is how do you use money so that it gives you the best chance of being well, both physically and mentally, and being healthy and getting to live the life you want to live... We've changed its meaning before and we can change it again, and so I t