Let’s get something out of the way immediately: Jen Sincero’s You Are a Badass at Making Money is written in a voice that will either delight a reader or drive them to the exit within fifteen pages. Loud, conversational, profane, aggressively encouraging, decorated with exclamation points at a density that would make a copyeditor weep. Anyone who needs prose careful and measured will feel like they’re being lectured by someone three espressos deep and absolutely certain this needs to be heard, right now. Understandable reaction. It would also mean missing the genuinely useful content Sincero delivers — imperfectly, noisily, but substantively — underneath the performance.
Published in 2017, You Are a Badass at Making Money is the follow-up to Sincero’s You Are a Badass, one of the defining self-help bestsellers of the 2010s. Where the first book covered general self-confidence and life direction, this one zeroes in on money: the psychological relationship most people have with it, the specific beliefs that cap earning, and the mindset shifts Sincero argues are prerequisite to any real financial improvement. The book leans heavily on the law of attraction tradition, New Thought concepts, and “universal energy” — the idea that the universe is a responsive field of abundance that arranges itself around your dominant thoughts and beliefs about money.
An honest review of this book has to hold two things at once: real appreciation for what it gets right, real criticism for what it gets wrong. What it gets right — the psychology of money avoidance, the actual behavioral effects of limiting beliefs, the importance of bold action toward financial goals — is genuine and important. What it gets wrong — the law of attraction mechanism, the implication that positive thinking directly conjures material circumstances, the near-total neglect of financial mechanics — is equally real, and readers who take those parts literally are setting themselves up for disappointment. The job of this review is separating the signal from the noise.
There’s enough of both to make the effort worthwhile.
The Money Story: Why Psychology Precedes Strategy
Sincero’s most valuable contribution — the one that makes the book worth reading despite its limitations — is her insistence that the psychological relationship with money comes before the strategic, tactical one. Her central claim: most people struggling financially aren’t struggling primarily from a skill deficit, an information deficit, or an opportunity deficit. They’re struggling because of a deeply embedded psychological relationship with money that has them unconsciously avoiding, undermining, or simply failing to pursue the financial opportunities right in front of them.
This claim holds up psychologically. The “money story” — the collection of beliefs, associations, and emotional responses a person carries toward money, usually formed in childhood and running largely outside conscious awareness — is increasingly well-documented in behavioral finance and financial therapy research. Brad Klontz and Ted Klontz’s research on “money scripts” — implicit beliefs about money driving financial behavior — identified four main categories: money avoidance (money is bad, or you don’t deserve it), money worship (more money would solve your problems), money status (money as a measure of self-worth), and money vigilance (anxious hypervigilance about financial security). Each script produces predictable patterns of financial behavior, and predictable financial outcomes, that persist across income levels and resist information-based interventions remarkably well.
The person who grew up hearing that money is the root of all evil carries a money avoidance script that will produce, in Sincero’s vivid terminology, unconscious self-sabotage of every financial advance they attempt. The person who watched a parent work themselves into the ground for money that never seemed like enough carries a money anxiety script that drives chronic financial stress regardless of the actual account balance. The person who grew up associating wealth with moral corruption ends up unable to pursue serious financial opportunities without a psychic cost that eventually makes the effort feel not worth it. None of these patterns are imaginary. None get solved with better budgeting advice. They need exactly the kind of psychological excavation and rewriting Sincero is prescribing — regardless of the metaphysical wrapper she puts around why it matters.
Universal Energy and the Law of Attraction: What Works and What Doesn’t
Here’s where honest engagement with this book requires some friction. Sincero’s explanatory framework rests on the proposition that the universe is a field of unlimited abundance, and financial outcomes are largely determined by the frequency of thoughts and feelings about money — like attracts like, what you focus on expands, cultivate the emotional frequency of wealth and the universe arranges material circumstances to match. She tells stories of windfalls arriving after a shift in consciousness, of unexpected opportunities materializing once she stopped thinking small, of money appearing as if from nowhere once she started expecting it.
The law of attraction, taken as a literal description of how the physical world works, has no evidence behind it. The universe does not have a preference mechanism that responds to human thought frequencies. Financial outcomes are not cosmologically arranged around the quality of a person’s internal states. Money does not materialize out of a field of infinite abundance in response to visualization and positive expectation. Not a controversial scientific claim. Simply the current state of knowledge about how physical causation works, and no responsible review of a book making these claims should pretend it’s merely a matter of perspective.
And yet — the behavioral mechanism Sincero attributes to the law of attraction is real, and it produces real effects, even though the metaphysical mechanism she invokes isn’t the actual cause. A person shifting from a scarcity mindset to an abundance mindset doesn’t attract money from the universe. But they do change their attention, their behavior, their social presentation, in ways that consistently produce better financial outcomes. They notice opportunities they’d previously have filtered out. They pursue conversations they’d previously have avoided. They ask for what they want in situations where they’d previously have just accepted what was offered. They take risks they’d previously have considered not worth attempting. These behavioral changes, compounded over time, produce the financial improvements Sincero attributes to cosmic responsiveness.
The honest version of Sincero’s claim: changing the psychological relationship with money changes behavior, and that changes financial outcomes. Behavioral mechanism, not cosmological. But the shift in psychological relationship genuinely does come first — which is why she’s right that trying to fix finances with strategy and tactics alone, without touching the psychology, usually fails. Right insight about the sequencing. Wrong explanation for the mechanism. For practical purposes, the sequencing insight is the one that matters.
Getting Specific: The Decision to Be Rich
One of Sincero’s most practically actionable instructions — buried in the enthusiasm and the metaphysics, but worth digging out and applying — is her demand for specificity in financial intention. She’s impatient with vague aspirations to “make more money” or “be better with finances.” What specific number? By when? Doing what? In her framework, the vagueness of most people’s financial intentions isn’t mere imprecision. It’s evidence they haven’t actually decided to be rich — that they’ve let themselves have the psychological comfort of wanting something without the psychological exposure of committing to it specifically enough to measure success or failure.
This critique is psychologically accurate and behaviorally important. Research on goal specificity consistently shows vague goals produce vague results — and that the vagueness is often a form of self-protection. Someone who commits to earning $200,000 by the end of next year has exposed themselves to measurable failure. Someone who just wants to “make more money” has protected themselves from that possibility by setting no target that can be missed. The second person feels less anxious about their financial future in the short term, because there’s no commitment to violate. They also achieve less, because specific commitments activate planning and action in ways vague aspirations never do.
Sincero’s instruction to write down a specific number — a specific financial goal, a specific timeline — isn’t law of attraction magic. It’s goal specification research, applied to financial planning. The evidence that written goals with specific targets outperform unwritten, vague aspirations is among the strongest findings in motivation research. Her delivery — “decide to be rich, right now, and write down the number” — isn’t careful or detailed. But the core instruction is correct, and the bluntness of it cuts through the qualifications and hesitations most people use to dodge commitments that could expose them to failure.
Investing in Yourself: The High-Yield Asset Sincero Actually Believes In
This is the most financially specific and most controversial prescription in the book, and it needs careful handling. Sincero’s general principle — that investing in skills, relationships, and capabilities that raise your earning power often returns more than conventional investment vehicles — is well supported. Human capital theory, which treats a person’s skills and knowledge as an asset generating future income streams, is one of the empirically strongest frameworks in economics. Investment in education, skill development, and network building consistently produces positive returns in labor markets — often very large returns for skills in high demand.
The complication: Sincero’s specific prescriptions — take out a loan if necessary to invest in coaching, spend more than feels affordable on programs promising transformation — aren’t universally sound financial advice, and they can be genuinely harmful applied without discrimination. The coaching industry, including the specific flavor of “success coaching” and “mindset coaching” this book effectively promotes, has a wildly variable quality distribution and almost no evidence base for the specific outcomes it promises. Someone who takes out a $10,000 loan for a coaching program that never delivers meaningful skills or contacts isn’t investing in themselves. They’re paying for inspiration that compounds as debt instead of capability.
The responsible reading of Sincero’s self-investment principle: investing in skills, relationships, and earning capacity is often the highest-yield investment available, and the scarcity mindset that makes people reflexively reluctant to spend on their own development is a genuine obstacle to financial growth. But not all self-investment is equal. An investment in a skill that’s in high demand and actually gets used is a different animal than an expensive program promising mindset transformation. Sincero’s enthusiasm for the investment principle, without enough discrimination about what counts as a sound investment, is where her advice is most likely to lead readers astray.
Taking Massive Action: The One Thing Sincero Gets Unambiguously Right
Whatever its limitations, You Are a Badass at Making Money is genuinely useful for one of the most common and most underappreciated financial problems: not taking enough action. Sincero isn’t writing for the person who needs to be told to be more careful, more analytical, more cautious. She’s writing for the person who’s been careful, analytical, and cautious for years — planning, preparing, waiting for the right moment — and has produced exactly nothing in the meantime, because the actual barrier was never insufficient preparation. It was insufficient willingness to risk being wrong.
Genuinely common problem, this. Research on entrepreneurial inaction and career stagnation consistently identifies fear of failure, risk aversion, and perfectionism as among the biggest barriers to financial advancement for high-capability people. The person who knows how to start a business but doesn’t, who has the skills for a higher-paid role but never applies, who has the idea for a product but won’t launch until it’s perfect — this person isn’t failing for lack of strategy. Failing for lack of courage to act under uncertainty. Sincero’s book is written almost entirely for this person, and for this exact problem, it’s unusually well suited.
The specific instruction — bold, decisive action toward financial goals, stop waiting for permission, stop making perfect the enemy of good, take the risk now and work out the details as you go — isn’t universally applicable financial advice. There are contexts where careful preparation genuinely matters, where risk management is important, where acting before you’re ready produces avoidable and costly failures. But those contexts aren’t where most of Sincero’s readers are stuck. They’re stuck in the opposite failure mode, and the antidote to that mode isn’t more planning. It’s more action. Sincero delivers the antidote with a force and directness most personal finance books are far too polite to attempt.
The Gratitude Practice and Abundance Mindset: Psychological Reality Behind the Language
Like most books in the New Thought tradition, You Are a Badass at Making Money leans on gratitude and abundance orientation as core components of the “rich mindset.” Sincero’s prescription: appreciate what you have, act as if you’re already wealthy, speak and think and behave from abundance rather than scarcity, and trust that orientation to attract more of what you appreciate.
The cosmological mechanism — attraction — isn’t real in any physically literal sense, as already covered. But the psychological mechanism — that emotional orientation shapes attention, motivation, and behavior in ways producing different outcomes — is well established. Research on positive affect and creative problem-solving, conducted by Barbara Fredrickson and others, shows positive emotional states broaden the scope of attention and cognition in ways negative states don’t — widening the range of solutions people see, the connections they make, the willingness to engage novel challenges. The person in an abundance mindset isn’t attracting money from the universe. They’re processing the same financial landscape with attentional and cognitive resources that let them see and pursue opportunities the scarcity-minded person filters straight out.
Sincero’s specific gratitude practices — writing down what you’re grateful for, finding things to appreciate in the current financial situation no matter how grim it looks, practicing feeling wealthy rather than anxious — are psychologically effective tools for shifting the emotional state that determines attentional and behavioral orientation. They work not because the universe rewards grateful people, but because grateful, appreciative mental states produce the kind of open, curious, confident engagement with the world that outperforms anxious, defensive, scarcity-focused mental states. The packaging is New Age. The content is cognitive behavioral. The outcomes are real.
What This Book Does Not Teach (And Must Be Found Elsewhere)
The psychological prescriptions here — clear out limiting beliefs about money, take bold action toward financial goals, invest in earning capacity, cultivate real appreciation for what you have — are preconditions for financial improvement, not sufficient conditions on their own. Someone who successfully clears their money story, commits to a specific target, and takes massive action still needs to know something about allocating income, avoiding wealth-destroying debt, investing for long-term growth, building financial systems that work while they sleep. Sincero’s book does nothing to provide that knowledge. It assumes, implicitly, that the person with the right mindset will figure out the mechanics, or attract into their life the people who’ll teach them. Might work for some readers. Leaves others well motivated but structurally unprepared.
The honest prescription: read Sincero’s book for what it’s uniquely good at — excavating and challenging the psychological relationship with money that’s limiting financial behavior — and follow it with the kind of practical personal finance education that tells you what to do with the energy and intention she’s helped generate. Her book is the ignition. The finance education is the map. Both are needed. She only provides one.
The Critical Take: When Abundance Coaching Becomes Harmful
Financial struggle isn’t primarily a mindset problem. It’s produced by a complex interaction of individual psychology, structural opportunity, market conditions, health, family circumstance, geographic location, education access, and the accumulated effects of historical injustice. A single parent working two minimum-wage jobs isn’t failing to think abundantly enough. Someone carrying $80,000 in student debt for a credential the labor market doesn’t value at the implied premium isn’t failing to take massive enough action. A framework that locates the cause of financial struggle entirely in a person’s internal states, and treats the solution as entirely psychological reprogramming plus bold action, systematically misrepresents the causes of financial inequality — and quietly delegitimizes the structural interventions that would actually address them.
Sincero isn’t a malicious writer, and whatever harm her framework causes is probably unintentional. Still real, though. Someone who reads this book and concludes that the reason they’re not wealthy is they haven’t sufficiently cleared their money story, upgraded their beliefs, and taken massive enough action — and who doesn’t notice the structural conditions genuinely constraining their opportunities — has been handed a psychologically plausible explanation for their circumstances that happens to be wrong. That error carries costs that aren’t trivial.
The Accurate Bottom Line: What to Take and What to Leave
Here’s the honest verdict on You Are a Badass at Making Money: significantly useful for a specific kind of reader in a specific situation, potentially misleading for other kinds of readers in other situations. The reader it serves best: someone with genuine financial potential — marketable skills, real opportunities, structural conditions that make significant income growth possible — who’s being held back mainly by their own psychological relationship with money and their own reluctance to act boldly. For this reader, the book can be genuinely catalytic. It names the psychological patterns holding them back with unusual clarity and emotional force, and pushes them credibly toward the decisive action their actual situation already makes possible.
The reader for whom the book is less useful, or potentially harmful: someone whose financial difficulties are primarily structural rather than psychological, who needs financial mechanics education rather than mindset work, and who’s particularly susceptible to the magical-thinking parts of the law of attraction framework. These readers will find the book exciting and motivating for a while, then disappointed when the mental clarity they’ve achieved fails to produce material results without the structural changes and practical skills Sincero never provides.
Read it for the money story work. Read it for the permission to want more, ask for more, stop apologizing for financial ambition. Read it for the push toward decisive action. Put it down when the universal energy explanations start. Follow it with practical personal finance education. And hold it all with the clarity that mindset is the beginning of financial change, not the end of it — that the psychological work Sincero is selling is the precondition for financial improvement, not the mechanism that produces it directly. With those qualifications in place, there’s genuine value in these pages, delivered with an enthusiasm that, for all its excess, isn’t entirely misplaced.
Identifying Your Money Story: The Practical Excavation
The questions Sincero poses — What did you hear about money growing up? What did you see the adults around you do with money? What did you decide, as a child, money meant about people, about safety, about love, about worth? What’s the most shameful thing you believe about your relationship with money? — are the same entry points financial therapists and behavioral finance researchers would recognize as the way into the implicit belief system driving financial behavior. Children build their financial belief systems not from explicit teaching but from observation, emotional experience, and the meaning-making childhood cognition applies to both. The child who watches a parent go anxious and withdrawn when the bills arrive has learned something about money that no amount of adult financial education will fully overwrite without deliberate examination.
The practical exercise Sincero recommends — writing out the answers to these questions in as much detail as possible, without editing or self-censorship — is a version of what therapists call free writing or expressive writing, and the research on expressive writing as an emotional processing tool is substantial. James Pennebaker’s foundational research showed that writing in detail about emotionally significant experiences produces measurable improvements in both psychological wellbeing and physical health outcomes, effects that persist for months after the writing exercise. The mechanism appears to involve the cognitive processing that structured narrative requires: converting diffuse emotional experience into coherent narrative produces the kind of meaning-making that reduces the emotional charge of the experience and makes its influence on behavior more visible, more accessible to deliberate change.
For money specifically, the expressive writing process Sincero recommends makes the implicit explicit — surfacing the specific narrative about money that’s been running below conscious awareness and directing financial behavior in ways the conscious strategic mind can’t see or override. Someone who completes this exercise and discovers a deeply held belief that wanting money is selfish, or that financial success would alienate them from the people they love, or that they’re fundamentally not the kind of person who has money — this person has identified the specific belief limiting their financial behavior. Identification doesn’t automatically change the belief. But it’s the prerequisite for changing it, and Sincero’s framework provides the starting point for that prerequisite work with unusual directness.
The Community Problem: Who Are You Surrounding Yourself With?
One of the most practically significant and least discussed elements of Sincero’s book is her attention to the social environment of financial development — specifically, whether the people you spend the most time with are aligned with or working against the financial growth you’re trying to achieve. Sincero is direct about this in a way most personal finance books aren’t: the people closest to you exert a powerful normative pull on your financial behavior, your financial ambitions, and your willingness to take the risks financial improvement requires.
The sociological research on peer influence and financial behavior is extensive and consistent. Robert Cialdini’s work on social proof — the tendency to use the behavior of people around us as information about what’s appropriate and achievable — has direct financial implications. Someone whose peer group earns modest incomes, has no investment accounts, and treats financial ambition as slightly suspect carries a different implicit model of what’s financially normal and achievable than someone whose peer group includes entrepreneurs, investors, high earners. Nobody consciously adopts these norms. They’re absorbed through continuous exposure to what the people around you do, discuss, and take for granted as normal.
Sincero’s prescription — actively seek out people further along the financial path you want to travel, join communities oriented around financial growth, spend less time with people whose financial norms and narratives are limiting — isn’t elitist advice about abandoning old friends. It’s a behavioral design recommendation grounded in the well-documented reality that a peer group’s financial behavior is one of the most powerful environmental inputs shaping your own. Nobody has to reject the people they love who carry limiting money stories. But those relationships need supplementing with exposure to people who demonstrate, through lived experience, that the financial life being built is genuinely possible and normal rather than exceptional and maybe a little unseemly.
The specific form this community-building takes can vary: mastermind groups, online communities organized around financial independence or entrepreneurship, mentorship relationships with more financially experienced practitioners, or simply the deliberate cultivation of friendships with people whose relationship with money is healthier and more expansive than your own. The vehicle matters less than the function — ongoing exposure to people for whom financial growth is normal and actively pursued shifts the implicit normative baseline in ways no amount of solo mindset work can replicate. Sincero understands this even without framing it sociologically, and her emphasis on finding “your tribe” of people who share her financial orientation is one of her most practically valuable recommendations.
Fear and Money: The Emotional Architecture of Financial Avoidance
Maybe the most psychologically interesting extended passage in You Are a Badass at Making Money is Sincero’s treatment of fear as the primary emotional mechanism of financial avoidance — the specific emotional experience driving the procrastination, the self-sabotage, the persistent gap between what people intend to do financially and what they actually do. She’s not the first writer to name fear as the enemy of financial action, but her breakdown of the specific forms money fear takes — and her prescriptions for working with rather than against those fears — runs more detailed than her casual voice suggests.
The specific fears Sincero identifies as most common and most financially destructive: the fear of failure (if I really try and still fail, what does that say about me?), the fear of success (if I actually make real money, who will I become, will the people I love still love me?), the fear of judgment (if I pursue money seriously, will others think I’m greedy, shallow, selling out?), and the fear of unworthiness (I’m not the kind of person who deserves to be rich). Each has a specific psychological structure driving specific avoidance behaviors, and recognizing which fear is running most actively in a given person’s financial psychology is the prerequisite for addressing it effectively.
The fear of success deserves particular attention, because it’s the least discussed and the most counterintuitive. The standard assumption is that people want success and get held back by fear of failure. But research on self-defeating behavior consistently identifies success anxiety — fear of the consequences of actually achieving the desired goal — as a significant driver of self-sabotage in people who otherwise look highly motivated. Someone who grew up in a family where wealth was associated with moral compromise, where financial success meant leaving behind the values or relationships of origin, or where being “too good” created resentment and social distance, may carry a genuine terror of financial success that’s entirely invisible to their conscious mind but reliably produces the self-defeating behavior they experience as inexplicable bad luck or bad timing.
Sincero’s prescription for working with fear — feel it, name it, act anyway rather than waiting for the fear to disappear before acting — is the correct one from a behavioral perspective. Waiting for fear to resolve before taking financial action is a strategy that guarantees permanent inaction, because fear of significant financial risk doesn’t dissipate before action. It dissipates through action, as the evidence of successful navigation gradually rewires the implicit belief that the feared outcome is both probable and catastrophic. The person waiting to feel confident before making a financial move will wait forever. The person who makes the move and uses the experience to update their model of what’s possible is the person whose financial psychology actually changes over time, instead of staying frozen in the emotional architecture of their earliest financial experiences.
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