You Are a Badass at Making Money

Mindset Before Mechanics

The premise of You Are a Badass at Making Money is that most people don’t fail financially because they lack information — they fail because of what is happening between their ears. The follow-up to Jen Sincero’s mega-selling You Are a Badass, this book deliberately ignores the spreadsheets and account types that fill conventional finance guides and trains its attention entirely on psychology: the deep, often unconscious beliefs about money, worth, and deserving that quietly sabotage even people who “know better.” Sincero’s central claim is that your relationship with money is shaped long before adulthood by family, culture, and accumulated shame, and that no amount of budgeting will help until those internal blocks are surfaced and rewired. For readers who already understand what to do but somehow never do it, this is a genuinely different and useful diagnosis.

From Broke Writer to Bestseller

Sincero writes with the authority of someone who lived the transformation she describes. She is candid and funny about her years as a broke freelance writer living in a converted garage in her forties, convinced that wanting money was somehow grubby or unspiritual — and about the deliberate mindset overhaul that preceded her becoming a wealthy, internationally bestselling author. This personal arc gives the book its credibility and its energy. Sincero is not lecturing from a pedestal; she is reporting from the other side of a wall she once couldn’t climb, and her insistence that the wall was mostly in her own head lands harder for being autobiographical. Her irreverent, profane, pep-talk-from-a-blunt-friend voice is the book’s signature, and it makes a subject most people find anxious or boring feel approachable and even fun.

Surfacing the Money Blocks

Much of the book is devoted to identifying and dismantling “limiting beliefs” about money — the inherited scripts (money is the root of all evil, rich people are greedy, I’m just not good with money, wanting more is selfish) that operate below conscious awareness and steer behavior. Sincero argues that you cannot earn your way past beliefs that make you uncomfortable with having, wanting, or receiving money, because some part of you will keep sabotaging the result. Her remedy is a mix of self-examination, reframing, and deliberate practice in getting comfortable with abundance and with asking to be paid what you’re worth. This excavation of the subconscious obstacles to earning is the book’s most valuable and distinctive contribution, and it addresses a real gap that purely technical books ignore.

The Woo-Woo Question

It must be said plainly that the book leans heavily on a spiritual, manifestation-adjacent framing — talk of “the Universe,” of raising your “frequency,” of aligning your energy with abundance — that will be a deal-breaker for some readers and a delight to others. Sincero is firmly in the law-of-attraction tradition, and skeptics will roll their eyes at the metaphysics. Yet much of what she describes can be read in entirely secular terms: confidence, expectation, and self-belief genuinely do shape the actions people take and the opportunities they pursue, and “raise your frequency” is, stripped of the mysticism, not so different from “change your self-concept and act accordingly.” How much you enjoy the book will depend largely on your tolerance for the woo, but the underlying psychology often holds up even if the vocabulary doesn’t.

Invest in Yourself, Act Imperfectly

Where Sincero does turn practical, two themes dominate. The first is investing in yourself — spending on coaching, courses, tools, and skills as the highest-return asset available, on the logic that growing your own earning capacity outperforms penny-pinching. The second is a bias toward action: taking imperfect, uncomfortable steps now rather than waiting for confidence or perfect conditions that never arrive. Both are sound and motivating, and they translate the mindset work into momentum. This is not a book that will teach you to allocate a portfolio, but it may be the book that finally gets a stuck person to ask for the raise, launch the business, or charge what they’re worth.

Strengths and Limits

The book’s strengths are its voice, its psychological focus, and its genuine power to motivate readers who feel blocked. Its limitations are equally clear. It is essentially silent on the mechanics of personal finance — budgeting, investing, debt, taxes — so it is a complement to a practical guide, not a substitute. And the heavy manifestation framing genuinely alienates a meaningful slice of readers, who will find the “Universe” talk grating rather than inspiring. It is a mindset book first and last, and it should be approached as one.

Where It Fits

It helps to think of You Are a Badass at Making Money as occupying the opposite corner of the bookshelf from the index-fund and budgeting classics. Those books answer the question “what should I do with my money?” with admirable rigor and assume you’ll simply go and do it. Sincero answers a different and, for many people, prior question: “why don’t I do the things I already know I should?” The two genres are complements, not competitors. A reader who has the spreadsheet knowledge but none of the confidence, or who carries a tangle of shame and avoidance around money, will get more from Sincero’s mindset jolt than from another technical primer — and can then return to the practical books and finally act on them. Understanding which problem you actually have, head or hands, is the key to knowing whether this is the right book for you right now.

The Bottom Line

You Are a Badass at Making Money is a useful and entertaining mindset book for the specific reader who keeps failing to act on financial knowledge they already possess. Its great insight — that beliefs about money often matter more than facts about money — is real and underexplored, and Sincero’s blunt, funny voice makes the inner work feel doable. The metaphysical packaging will repel skeptics, and the absence of practical mechanics means you’ll need a second book for the how. But as a confidence-and-mindset jolt to unstick a financially blocked person, it does a job that no spreadsheet ever could.

Our rating: 4.4/5 — A funny, motivating mindset book that targets the real reason many people stay stuck with money: their beliefs about it — best paired with a practical guide, and best enjoyed by readers who can tolerate the manifestation framing.

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