You Are a Badass at Making Money

What this book actually teaches

You Are a Badass at Making Money by Jen Sincero, published in 2017, is a motivational personal finance book that argues the primary obstacle between most people and financial success is not a lack of knowledge or opportunity but a set of self-limiting beliefs, inherited attitudes about money, and emotional blocks that operate below the level of conscious decision-making. Sincero, who wrote You Are a Badass in 2013, applies the same self-help framework to money specifically — the argument being that the internal work of examining and changing your relationship with wealth is the prerequisite for the external work of earning more of it.

The book's central distinction is between what Sincero calls the Big Me (the conscious, intentional self that sets financial goals) and the Little Me (the subconscious patterns, often installed in childhood, that undermine those goals through avoidance, self-sabotage, and beliefs that frame wealth as dangerous, selfish, or unattainable for someone like you). The argument is that most people are running on financial belief systems they absorbed from parents, peers, and culture before they had the capacity to evaluate them — and that these belief systems, not income or opportunity, are what actually determine financial outcomes. The practical implication is that the work of changing financial outcomes is largely internal: identifying the specific beliefs that limit income, examining where they came from, and consciously replacing them.

The income-generating chapters are structured around getting comfortable with wanting more money, with asking for it explicitly, with charging what the market will bear rather than what feels modest, and with seeing financial success as compatible with being a good person rather than as evidence of greed. Sincero writes from the experience of being broke in her forties and then significantly increasing her income in her fifties through coaching, speaking, and writing — and the book's advice reflects that entrepreneurial and freelance context more than it does employment or investing.

The energy and mindset chapters draw on the Law of Attraction framework — the idea that thoughts and beliefs attract corresponding experiences, including financial ones. Sincero presents this framework without significant qualification, which is the book's most divisive element: readers who find the Law of Attraction framework useful will find these chapters reinforcing; readers who find it unfounded will find them unconvincing and will need to extract the practical advice about examining self-limiting beliefs from the metaphysical framing around it.

The action chapters are more concrete: raise your rates, ask for a raise, start the business, make the ask, stop waiting until conditions are perfect. Sincero is direct about the role of inaction in income stagnation — not as a character flaw but as the predictable output of the fear and self-limiting beliefs the book addresses. The guidance on getting specific about how much money you want and why — naming a number, naming what it would change, naming what you are trading for staying where you are — is more useful than most motivational books manage in this territory.

This is for people who are doing the external work of trying to earn more — updating resumes, taking courses, starting side businesses — but finding that the results do not match the effort, and who are open to the possibility that internal obstacles are playing a larger role than they have acknowledged.

The weaknesses are rigor and applicability. The Law of Attraction framing is presented as fact rather than one framework among several, and readers who do not share the framework's premises will find significant portions of the book unconvincing. The advice skews toward self-employment and entrepreneurship — the specific guidance on raising rates, signing clients, and charging your worth maps cleanly onto freelance and coaching contexts but less cleanly onto salaried employment or investing. The book does not address debt reduction, savings, investing, or tax strategy — readers who need those tools are better served elsewhere. The motivational genre's characteristic tendency toward repetition is present: the book's core argument could be compressed without loss.

For people who are not primarily blocked by knowledge or opportunity but by the internal story they are running about money and what they deserve to earn, You Are a Badass at Making Money is an effective and direct intervention — most useful alongside a practical personal finance resource that covers the investing and debt management the book explicitly does not.

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About Jen Sincero

Read more from Jen Sincero and explore the full bibliography on ClearValue Books.