We built CrispyMoney because the finance books that helped us most were scattered across a dozen different Amazon searches. We put them in one place, for readers exactly like us.
Back in 2023, this was just a reading list five of us passed around. All mid-twenties, all stuck in some version of the same fog. One of us was still paying off a maxed-out credit card. One avoided opening her KiwiSaver statements because they made her anxious. One was convinced investing was "for other people." The other two genuinely couldn't have told you where their pay went most fortnights. The list started as a shared Google Doc. It became something bigger once we noticed almost every actually useful money book was written decades ago, for a different generation, in a tone closer to a lecture than a conversation.
So we started reading everything, old standards like The Richest Man in Babylon, newer and blunter ones like I Will Teach You to Be Rich, paying attention to which ones changed what we actually did with money, versus which ones were just nice to read on a Sunday. CrispyMoney is the shortcut we wish we'd had back then. A shelf of only the books that hold up, sorted by where you're actually at, not by publication date or whoever had the biggest marketing budget.
These days we ship across New Zealand and have helped more than twelve thousand readers find something that fit their actual situation, whether that's a graduate figuring out payday budgeting for the first time or someone in their early thirties finally opening an investment account. Still a small team. We still argue about which books deserve shelf space, and every single one we sell, someone here has actually read.
Three principles guide every book we add to the shop and every article we publish on the blog.
Needs a finance degree to get through it? It doesn't make the shelf. Everything we stock explains itself in language a smart 22-year-old with zero finance background can follow on the first read, no re-reading a paragraph three times required.
We publish reviews we didn't write, mediocre ones included, and we'll say plainly we're not licensed financial advisers. Just readers who put in the hours so you don't have to wade through it all yourself.
One audience, built around every book, filter and article here: people in their twenties and early thirties, mostly starting from zero. Nothing on this site is written with a retiree or a hedge fund manager in mind.
A small crew of readers, editors and one very opinionated ex-accountant, based in Auckland.