Recent Finance and Accounting Book Reading List

I’m an avid reader and one of my more recent interests has been delving into the world of finance, investing, and accounting. I’m even taking an intro accounting class online through a local community college. Hopefully, after acing this class I can continue through all the prerequisite classes for the accounting master’s degree and pursue that if I so choose to do so. Beyond just reading my textbook and pouring through example after example of how basic financial accounting works, I also decided to pick up some Kindle reading to help solidify some of these concepts in my mind. What’s cool is, that I only spent $14 on these five books total thanks to some being on sale a few months ago and a $10 Amazon gift card that I had received from a grocery store promo.

Finance Reading List

Financial Statements: A Step-by-Step Guide to Understanding and Creating Financial Reports

The Essentials of Finance and Accounting for Nonfinancial Managers

The Wall Street MBA, Second Edition

The Bond Book, Third Edition: Everything Investors Need to Know About Treasuries, Municipals, GNMAs, Corporates, Zeros, Bond Funds, Money Market Funds, and More

Financial Shenanigans, Third Edition

Now, I’ve completed three out of the five books and am halfway through The Bond Book.  I’ve still got to get through the rest of that and Financial Shenanigans, which explores how companies cook the books and what you should be looking for to help detect such actions. It’ll probably be a little while before I finish both of those books, since I am also reading other novels and philosophy topics beyond this list of titles.

I found the Financial Statements and The Essentials of Finance and Accounting books to be the most beneficial to me. They really helped to break down basic accounting for businesses and made me much more comfortable analyzing a company’s balance sheet. I feel that, once I have a very in depth understanding of accounting in conjunction with my naturally conservative investing disposition, my investing decision making and success will improve greatly. I will also be able to get a true understand of earnings and how they function for a specific corporation as well as calculate a reasonable fair value to pay for shares of stock.

The books on the list are obviously introductory texts which only scratch the surface of these topics. I want the next 6 months to a year to serve as a gateway to a real and total understanding of financial activities and how to build long-term, sustainable, and diversified wealth. The more you know, the fewer the mistakes, and the higher the profits…at least in theory.