Loose Change #1

10 notes on my first book, 'Money Doesn't Grow On Trees'

Dear Friend,

1. I wrote a book! It’s called Money Doesn’t Grow On Trees and published by Simon & Schuster. Pre-orders are live, and the book will be in physical bookstores a month from now.

2. I’ve been writing about personal finance since 2017. Perhaps this is a dramatic statement, but it is my calling. It gives me great joy to help people, especially women, get a grip on their finances and even invest. And perhaps this is an even more dramatic statement, but I knew exactly what kind of book I wanted to write when I started writing about money.

   

3. Maybe this is because I’ve always been curious about how emotional, how touchy, how reactive people get when they’ve to deal with rectangular-shaped pieces of paper.

4. I want to say it consciously started sometime in class XI, when I injured (what I believed was) a strong friendship beyond repair. My mistake? Asking them to split a film’s ticket money. The reaction made no sense to me, and in retrospect, neither did my grovelling to fix the situation. The friendship didn’t last, but my obsession with trying to understand how money affects different people differently did.

5. Through the course of my training as a Chartered Accountant and my time as a CA in practice - I learned how money was the language of dreams. Whether it was a fellow student who measured their success in salary or a client who measured time in tax liabilities, money was - is - a proxy for ambition, success, fear and failure.

6. But this is not how we talk about money or personal finance in mainstream media.

7. Investments, interest rates, inflation, risks and returns - jargon in numbers with confusing commentary, deliberately gatekeeping a topic that runs our everyday lives. Personal finance has become this abstract, clinical thing instead of something deeply personal—something that shapes our dreams, ambitions, anxieties, and identities.

8. With 'Money Doesn’t Grow On Trees', I wanted to change that. This isn’t another book that’ll lectures you, nor does it employ jargon or condescension. Instead, it talks about finance in the context of our lives, while addressing our complicated, messy, and very human relationship with money.

9. Will it cover mutual funds? Stocks? Real Estate? Insurance? Retirement planning? Yes. It will also cover our relationship with money, the role of money in our relationships, peer pressure, why salary negotiations feel emotionally charged, how children affect our finances, and what financial freedom could mean to you.

10. My hope is simple: that this book will help you understand yourself and your money better, and perhaps even have a laugh or two along the way.

    I do hope you enjoy reading it.

    Until next time,

    Lavanya