The Ducat Blog

7 Best Personal Finance Books I’ve Ever Read

2026-05-28T00:00:00Z

At the risk of sounding like a cliché, I genuinely think good books on money management are one of the fastest ways you can develop good financial hygiene.

That's how I learned most of what I know about money, and how my personal money management has improved over the last 10 years.

But in a saturated market, not every book on personal finance has advice worth following.

So, in this post, I'll share a handpicked list of books that I've read cover-to-cover and used the principles inside in some way in my life.

Here we go:

1. Die with Zero

The premise of this book is to develop a mindset that money is not for hoarding. Savings are essential, sure, but there's also a thing called too much saving.

The purpose of money is to unlock opportunities for you and make your life better and easier.

This book will teach you how to develop this balanced mindset without blowing all your money away.

View on Goodreads

2. The Psychology of Money

How you and I spend, save, and invest money can be vastly different because our worldviews are shaped by our past experiences and interactions.

This book will help you understand the role of emotions in finance, set realistic expectations, and account for unseen risks when investing money.

In this connected world, understanding how people behave with money can help us manage our finances better.

View on Goodreads

3. I Will Teach You to Be Rich

Instead of guilt-tripping you over buying another latte or video game, this book introduces the concept of “conscious spending”.

With conscious spending, you stop spending money on things that don't bring you joy, so that you can reserve that quota on things you truly enjoy.

A book with practical steps to have more money available from your income without living too frugally.

View on Goodreads

4. The Automatic Millionaire

This book will guide you to set up automation around your income that will help you accumulate wealth on auto-pilot.

Usually, when salary hits the bank, or we get a payment from a client, it goes to paying bills and others.

This book takes a different path of paying yourself first through pre-tax investments, automated savings, etc. A wonderful read to build a system that saves or invests money like clockwork.

View on Goodreads

5. The Money Tree

This is a book about developing agency around money.

Instead of playing victim and sitting waiting for a winning lottery ticket to fall on our laps, we can actively find ways to make money using what we have.

The whole message is wrapped in an engaging story, which makes it an enjoyable read.

View on Goodreads

6. Financial Freedom

This is not another traditional FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early) book.

Instead, it teaches how to be creative in earning money, so that you don't have to give up most of the fun things in life to achieve financial freedom.

Even if you don't plan to retire early, the ideas in this book will help you build a solid financial ground for life.

View on Goodreads

7. The Moneyless Man

This is a bit of a tangential inclusion, and probably an experiment you and I will never attempt.

However, the economic experiment in this book helps us understand our relation with money, and just how often we can develop ingenious ways to get something done without needing substantial funds.

Even if you read it purely for entertainment, it's worth a read.

View on Goodreads

That's the end of this list. I might extend this later as I read more books on this subject.

But for now, if you're looking for a place to visualise your spending so that you can apply what you learn here and see progress, try Ducat.

Stop Moving Your Goalpost So Often

2026-05-26T00:00:00Z

Over the years of managing my money, I've noticed a factor that often keeps us from being satisfied with our financial situation.

And that's not knowing how much is enough for us.

In this blog post, we'll explore this angle and then work on arriving at a number that gets us out of this eternal unhappiness.

Let's start by understanding:

The cost of a moving goalpost

I had a colleague at work who had the “I'll be happy when I earn more than what I earn right now” mindset.

He regularly spent way more than what he could realistically afford, and not only blew his entire salary but also piled up massive debts.

His solution to this problem was not controlling his extravagant spending, but increasing his salary.

And so he did.

He hopped jobs within months of starting one, got a generous pay raise and returned to the same level of desperation like clockwork.

He was always short of money, even while earning a top-tier tech salary, and resorted to asking his friend circle to repeatedly bail him out of difficult financial situations.

You might interpret this situation as lifestyle creep.

And in some sense that's true.

The more he earned, the more he upgraded his lifestyle, sometimes too rapidly.

But what I like to take away from his story is a moving financial goalpost.

He didn't know how much was enough for him, and that kept him in a perpetual hamster wheel of chasing more money.

His goalpost kept moving far away, and he was never at peace with his financial situation.

Now, I'll admit:

For quite an extent throughout my career, I, too, had opted into this mindset.

The life I wanted was perpetually only one pay raise away.

But that changed:

When I seriously started planning to quit my job

In 2023, I decided I wanted to quit my job and work full-time on a side business I'd been nurturing for years.

It didn't pay enough to match my salary, but I figured if I could save myself a year's worth of runway, that should give me a good enough launchpad.

The thought that immediately followed this wish was that I had to stop moving my financial goalpost.

I had to pick an amount that I could live off comfortably and support my family every month, and be at peace with my finances to be able to work on growing the business undistracted.

So, I started totalling my usual spends for the last 6–8 months, added plenty of buffer to the average spend and arrived at a number that was “enough”.

Three years later, I'm still happy with that number.

If you're in the same boat and want to find the number that's enough for you, this is:

Where you can start

Firstly, there isn't a one-size-fits-all number here, and you don't need to live too frugally either.

You just need to figure out a number that lets you live comfortably, enables your “realistic” wishlist, and protects you on rainy days.

Often, that number is far smaller than what we usually estimate and is well within our reach.

Secondly, make a habit of tracking your expenses if you don't already.

Once you've been tracking your expenses for at least a few months, either in a spreadsheet or a dedicated app like Ducat, take some time to review your spending.

See how much of your monthly expenses are fixed costs, such as rent, utilities, approximate grocery bills, etc., and take into account any recurring expenses that come around once or twice a year. For example, insurance renewals, yearly subscriptions, travel, etc.

Ducat makes this easy in the reports section, where you can tweak the time range to see all transactions within the period, category-wise breakdowns and recurring subscriptions:

With this data, calculate your average monthly spend and add around 30–40% buffer to that number for unexpected expenses.

You can also keep, say, 20–30% of your monthly spend as an additional buffer for fun purchases or travel, if you can afford to.

The goal here is not to stop enjoying life. It's to pick a number that works for you and stick with it, at least for a while, instead of continuously moving it to a higher number every few months.

The former will bring you financial stability and a calm life. The latter will keep you in a Sisyphean quest for more.

A Framework for Buying Stuff Wisely

2026-05-23T00:00:00Z

A question I often ask myself when buying a new gadget, home accessory and other moderately expensive purchases is whether to go for the cheaper option or the more expensive one.

The answer isn't always straightforward, but I've found a good enough framework to make this decision without overthinking, which I'll share with you in this short post.

Let's start by:

Understanding the intention behind the purchase

The first question that comes to mind when buying an item is this:

Am I buying this to test the waters?

The answer to this question is how I decide the budget for the product.

For example, if I'm buying a gadget because it looks interesting but I'm unsure whether I'll seriously use it, I'll often opt for a low-priced product.

The benefit here is that this serves as a low-cost trial purchase.

If I don't end up using the product for long, I don't have a strong case of buyer's remorse because I haven't spent much on the purchase.

But if I do like the product and use it for a while, I could later survey high-end alternatives that might offer a better experience.

An example of this is when I bought an external keyboard for my MacBook.

I wanted to use my laptop in a desktop arrangement when at home, and I needed an external keyboard for the job.

Folks at my work suggested I get a mechanical keyboard to have a premium typing experience. But mechanical keyboards are expensive, and since I wasn't sure I was going to stick to this desktop setup, I opted for a less-expensive option.

The keyboard wasn't fancy, but it was good enough for regular use, and I stuck with that keyboard for a while.

Then, about a year or two later, I bought a more expensive mechanical keyboard, which I'm typing this blog post on.

You won't get the decision right every time, and sometimes, this approach might feel like a waste of money because you end up buying a tester product and then the actual one you wanted all along, but this question often guards us from wasting money on expensive impulse buys.

But even when our intentions are clear, a cheaper alternative often feels too good to ignore, especially in this age of fast fashion and use-and-throw culture.

Here's where:

Identifying the cost-per-use helps

When comparing two differently-priced options of a product, understanding their cost-per-use helps clear confusion, if you can afford both options.

A higher-priced quality product seems like a significant investment upfront, but that investment pays off if you're looking to use it long-term.

Let's understand this better with a story:

When the pandemic hit in 2020, and everyone moved to home offices, I started looking at chairs for my workspace.

After looking at a few, I decided to go for an AmazonBasics swivel chair that was quite inexpensive and looked like a good value for money.

And I got exactly what I paid for.

The chair was fine for a few months, and then it started showing signs of damage. Within a year, it became uncomfortable to sit on, and I developed severe back pain.

Soon after that, I stopped using it.

Then, in 2022, as I was setting up a filming studio for YouTube videos, I decided it was time I opted for a better chair.

This time, I upped my budget and opted for a higher-quality product that stung me a little when I paid for it, but it was worth the investment.

I've been using it every day for around three and a half years, and it's still nearly as good as the day it arrived.

In absolute figures, here are the cost-per-use of both options:

AmazonBasics Chair (₹5,500): I used it six days a week for around a year, say 51 weeks. Therefore, the figure comes to around ₹17.97/use.
Featherlite Chair (₹11,800): I'm still using it six days a week, for over three and a half years (~178 weeks). The figure is somewhere around ₹11.08/use and falling every day I keep using the chair.

Now, I have a hindsight benefit here, because I can compare the values long after I made the purchases and used the products.

But even during purchase, you can estimate a high-quality product to generally have a better cost-per-use than buying a cheaper alternative over and over again if you plan to use it for the long run.

So, here's:

The TL;DR

If I had to distil the framework I use in a single line, it would be this:

Invest in high-quality products if you intend to use them for a long time and can afford the price tag.

First, understand your intention and whether you're buying something for serious use. Then, adjust your budget accordingly.

And if you're looking to track these spends in a place that tells you your spending habits and helps you spend more consciously, try the Ducat app.

Add Friction to Things That Matter

2026-05-20T00:00:00Z

We've been running a collective race to remove or at least reduce friction from every corner of our lives for decades.

Note-taking apps arrived on our phones years ago to reduce friction in getting our thoughts recorded without having to pull out a pocket notebook.

AI is working to reduce friction at every touchpoint, whether it's searching the Web, reading, writing or even building software.

In e-commerce, 1-Tap Checkouts aim to reduce any friction between seeing an item and having it delivered to our doorsteps.

While I agree that minimising friction in some areas is necessary and productive, I'd argue we need to reintroduce friction in areas of our lives that matter.

We'll talk about that more in this post, but before that, let's start with:

Some real-world examples of effective friction

A few days ago, I was reading about Mason Currey's “inefficient” research process that has helped him write books and have a fruitful writing career.

What stood out was that even in the age of tools that make research a breeze, Mason has deliberately kept his process arduous.

Instead of having Claude or Gemini working autonomously, preparing drafts and connecting ideas, Mason does the entire process from collecting notes and highlights from books, writing commentary and fleshing out tangential ideas by hand.

And Mason's not alone here.

Ryan Holiday has written countless books using his laborious notecard method for years and still does.

But why? Why make a process difficult when we can make it frictionless?

Because the friction is the point.

When Mason or Ryan takes notes by hand and makes multiple passes, their minds see unexplored patterns, make connections and ultimately help them distil pages of information into a helpful theory or lesson for their books.

Without this intentional friction, the human mind only gets to process surface-level information, which isn't exactly the fertile ground for good ideas.

In all the years I've been writing online, I've noticed this too.

But the greatest benefit I've reaped with self-introduced friction is:

Adding friction to my personal finance

When I first started tracking my daily expenses, I opted for an app that read incoming transaction messages on my phone and automatically tracked those expenses.

It was frictionless and seemed like a good idea.

But after a while, I noticed that I had forgotten the app even existed.

It was on my phone, quietly doing its job, but since I was out of the loop, I never bothered to check the app for any spending reports, and it's safe to say that tracking this way had zero impact on how I spent my money.

Soon after that, I uninstalled the app and moved on to blowing away my paycheque like business as usual.

Then, about a year later, my wife suggested I use this app called Wallet to manually track my expenses and get a better idea of how I'm spending my money.

It seemed like a chore then, but after religiously following this habit for over 8 years, I can say it is one of the best habits I have developed in my life.

What changed? The added friction.

Logging each expense by hand made me conscious of my spending, which helped me spend more wisely the next time. It was a few minutes of work every day, but it reshaped my financial life.

But after tracking this way for 8 years, I realised, on many occasions, that while this level of friction worked, I could grease the wheels a bit.

So, when I started building my own personal finance app, Ducat, my goal was not to remove this habit of manually tracking expenses, but to make it a bit easier than filling out a form ten times a day.

I still log every expense or income by hand every day, but instead of clicking around buttons and jumping through form fields, I describe what I spent money on, and Ducat adds the expense for me:

I'm still in the loop, conscious of what I spend every day.

A side-benefit here is that every time I open the app to add an expense, I can see how I'm doing with money that day, which helps me understand if I'm overindulging and correct further spending accordingly:

All made possible by introducing the right amount of friction in an area of life I genuinely want to thrive.

But that begs a question:

Are frictionless workflows bad?

Short answer, no.

There are many areas where I enjoy having as little friction as possible. For example, playing music.

Instead of having to hunt down a cassette, plug it into a Walkman like in the early 2000s, tapping a song on my phone is a far better experience.

It's about adding friction where it can help.

While I can ask Gemini to plan an upcoming trip for me and have a good enough travel itinerary ready in a few clicks, I prefer doing the entire planning myself.

The friction here helps me be more intentional about the places I actually want to go, not what the trends suggest, and have a trip I'll remember for decades.

Your mileage may vary. Find the right level of friction for yourself in areas that matter to you.

And if you're looking to consciously manage your personal finance, try Ducat.

How I Track and Manage My Subscriptions

2026-05-18T00:00:00Z

Subscriptions are a part of everyone's expenses nowadays.

That isn't usually a problem when you're paying for something you regularly use and get value out of, but we often continue paying for things we might not use anymore or use very little, which doesn't justify the spend.

Moreover, this spending problem stays under the radar because a paid subscription on its own looks perfectly reasonable. $4.99/month here. $50/year there. When the cumulative spend could be significant if you've been subscribed for months or years.

For example, when I started tracking my subscriptions, I noticed that I'd spent over $200 on Netflix and YouTube Premium each and around $400 on iCloud+ over the years.

I didn't realise this before because I was only seeing it as ₹649/month (~$6.75/month) or ₹749/month.

That's the real problem with subscriptions.

It's not that any one of them is expensive. It's that the charges snowball over time, and if it's not something of value, you're essentially wasting money on autopilot.

In this blog post, I'll show you how I've been tracking my paid subscriptions and how you can track and manage yours through a straightforward workflow that ensures that you're only subscribed to what you actually use.

Let's start by:

Understanding the problem further

One of the primary visibility problems with subscriptions is that they are scattered.

Some are billed through the App Store or Google Play because you subscribed to these services on your phone. And the rest from a gazillion other sources because you subscribed to a service on the Web.

There's no single screen that shows you all of them at once.

And you only really notice a subscription when the charge hits your account. By that point, you've already been billed, so the earliest you can do anything about it is next month or next year.

A spreadsheet sounds like a fix, but it's quite limited.

For example, a simple table might give you a current overview, but you either have to keep updating it to match the next billing dates or write extensive formulas to do the job.

Moreover, a spreadsheet won't remind you when a subscription charge hits, so that you can decide to keep or cancel the subscription.

It's a passive list.

A better approach is to use a subscription tracker app to do this management for you once set up.

You can choose whichever app suits your needs. I use Ducat because it not only lets me see my subscriptions and recurring commitments easily, but also accounts for those expenses in my daily expense tracking.

Subscriptions and one-time expenses are better tracked together, and this app does that job well.

Here's how it works:

First, let's start by:

Adding all active subscriptions

I used three sources to find services I've subscribed to. Feel free to tweak as needed.

First, the App Store or Google Play Store is the most convenient starting point.

For example, if, like me, you use an iOS device, you can open the App Store, go to your profile, and tap Subscriptions to see a list of your active subscriptions:

Once I had the list of my active subscriptions through App Store, the next step was to track these subscriptions in the Ducat app.

Clicking the + button in the Subscriptions page presents a list of suggested subscription vendors to choose from:

I can search the service I'm subscribed to, choose it from the list and fill in the relevant details such as price, billing frequency, start date, etc.

Now, App Store doesn't show when a subscription started, so I searched for this subscription in my email to see when I first subscribed to this service:

Adding an accurate start date here helps because Ducat can estimate how much you've spent on this subscription so far.

This is how I realised I had already spent around $400 on iCloud+ so far.

Before saving, we can set the subscription source as App Store, so that we can quickly identify where this subscription is billed later on:

Also, I usually keep the reminder date to 3 days before, but you can switch it to other options.

Finally, if I need to remember something about the subscription, such as if I subscribed at a discounted pricing which might lapse on cancellation, I can note that in the Personal notes section to remember it later:

Once saved, the subscription now shows up in the subscriptions list.

Now, once I tracked all active subscriptions from the App Store, I moved on to finding services subscribed to outside of it.

One of the easiest approaches was to simply look at the apps and services on my phone and laptop and think of anything I regularly use, such as YouTube Premium, and add these subscriptions to Ducat as before.

But there were still some services that I used a while ago that I don't use much anymore.

For such services, I opened my email app and searched for phrases like "renews", "billing", "subscription", etc.

If you use Gmail, you can paste the filter, ("renews" OR "billing"), in the search box to surface many of your subscription billing emails:

Between these three sources, I tracked at least 90% of my paid subscriptions, which was enough to start and get an idea of my recurring spends.

Now that we have tracked, if not all, at least most of our subscriptions, let's:

Do a light editing

Once everything is in Ducat, the Subscription screen tells a clear story of the state of your subscriptions.

First, the top subscriptions chart shows your five biggest spends ranked by total amount paid since you started the subscription:

This is the number that can be surprising.

The figure might not be exact, but it gives you a ballpark estimate of what you've spent on something over the time you've been subscribed to the service.

We don't usually realise we've been quietly blowing so much money on a subscription until we see the cumulative spend.

Another useful piece of information on the Subscriptions page is the total amount you're still committed to spend before the month ends.

For example, apart from all the subscriptions I had already paid for this month, I can see I still have two expensive renewals totalling close to ₹37,531.59 (~$390) due to renew before the month ends:

This gives a heads up on what's coming, and we can act accordingly on whether to keep or cancel these subscriptions.

The Home screen provides a more narrowed view by showing a timeline of all subscription payments due in the next 7 days:

With this information at hand, we can do an initial audit and use this opportunity to cancel any unused subscriptions.

For example, while looking at my subscriptions dashboard, I saw I was subscribed to Epidemic Sound, but I realised I hadn't used it in months.

I had subscribed to it to download soundtracks for my YouTube videos, but I haven't been making videos lately, so I no longer need this subscription.

I can therefore cancel it before the renewal date, save the money now, and resubscribe whenever required.

This is where Ducat helps a bit more by handing me a link to a service's cancellation help page whenever possible.

On the Epidemic Sound subscription page, I can see the subscription source is highlighted in green and hovering over it shows the following help message:

Clicking on the link here takes me to the Epidemic Sound help page, which can guide me through the cancellation process.

This is helpful sometimes, as many companies tend to bury their cancellation page deep within the app settings. So, instead of spending time finding that tiny setting, the help page provides a shortcut.

It removes the usual friction of searching for "how do I cancel X."

After cancelling my Epidemic Sound subscription, I marked it as cancelled on Ducat so that it doesn't count in my active subscriptions anymore:

Now, while active subscriptions can quietly drain our bank balance, another thing we often neglect is a free trial that automatically converts to a paid subscription.

Here's how to:

Manage free trials

Free trials are a fantastic way to test a product or service before committing to a subscription.

But the problem is that many services ask for your payment details upfront and automatically convert the trial into a paid subscription the moment it ends.

It's easy to sign up for several of these in a short stretch of time, and then forget about all of them until you see the charge on your bank account statement.

One of the ways I manage free trials is to immediately cancel the trial if the app allows me to keep access to the service until the trial ends.

This ensures that even if I forget to cancel the trial before it auto-converts into a paid subscription, I don't get charged. My access simply expires after the free trial period.

But if you think you might actually use the service, or don't want to cancel and then resubscribe for any reason, Ducat helps.

After starting a trial subscription, you can add it to Ducat with the Free trial switch turned on:

Two days before the trial ends, Ducat will send you an email reminder:

You can cancel the trial before you're charged, or let it convert if you've found it useful. Either way, you get to consciously cancel or keep the subscription and avoid seeing a surprise charge.

Now, while this one-time exercise will help you prune your subscription list, it's better to:

Make tracking a regular habit

We usually keep subscribing to apps and services, and if we don't keep an eye on these new subscriptions, then we're back to square one.

Fortunately, apps like Ducat make the process easy.

Every time you sign up for something new, open Ducat and add the new subscription.

Once added, Ducat will send you renewal reminders before you're charged for it, like this:

Here, the subscription I tracked is charged in USD while my home currency is INR, so Ducat converted the charge amount into an approximate local amount for easy comprehension.

Another way to keep an eye on all subscriptions is to look for recurring spends in reports.

For example, the weekly or monthly reports breakdown shows what percentage of your total spending went to subscriptions, the exact amount, and which services were charged in that period.

This allows you to revisit your existing subscriptions and prune your list as needed.

Subscriptions are the new norm, and they're not bad if you keep getting recurring value out of the product, be it work or entertainment.

The problem appears when we lose sight of what we're subscribed to.

Try the techniques in this article to have a bird's-eye view of all your subscriptions and be aware before that next charge hits your account.