The 5-Minute Finance
Decoding wealth. Helping you make, manage and multiply money,
- Top in Finance
- #61
- Subscribers
- 138K
- Followers
- 139K
- Recommends
- 0
rounded by Substack
other newsletters
What they write about
Short personal-finance essays on habits and mindset. Recurring subjects include what to do the moment a paycheck lands, saving milestones, status spending and lifestyle signalling, attention and screen time, and lessons drawn from well-known personal-finance and self-improvement books.
- personal finance
- saving
- money habits
- book reviews
- behavioural finance
Recent examples: The Intelligent Investor: Warren Buffett’s favourite book (Summary) · How i save 70% of my income
Written from The 5-Minute Finance’s own published post titles and openings in Sep 11, 2026. It describes the subjects the newsletter covers, not its views, and is not investment advice.
Growth history
Subscribers (thousands, nightly)
120K on Sep 10, 2026 → 138K on Oct 21, 2026
Followers (thousands, nightly)
Rank in Substack’s finance leaderboard: #61 today · #70 a week ago · #83 a month ago
Stats worth sharing
Tracked since Sep 10, 2026 — 42 daily snapshots so far. The card below is built from what we track and refreshes nightly.
- Percentile
- Top 12%
- Best rank seen
- #54
- Rank, 7 days
- +9 places
- Rank, 30 days
- +22 places
- Subscribers added
- +18K
- Followers added
- +18K
- Posts
- 3
- Reactions per post
- 256
- Reactions tracked
- 4.1K
of 525 ranked finance newsletters
on Oct 20, 2026
since tracking began
since tracking began
last 30 days
average, recent posts
across 16 posts
Most-reacted post we have seen: Your brain is being eaten alive, and hobbies are the cure. — 590 reactions on Aug 3, 2026.
Recent posts
- The Intelligent Investor: Warren Buffett’s favourite book (Summary)
Warren Buffett is currently worth around $145 billion, a fortune built almost entirely through investing. He did not inherit it, he did not build a technology company, and he did not get lucky on a single trade. He built it by applying a set of principles that he learned from one book, written by his mentor Benjamin Graham, and has spent the last seventy years executing with extraordinary consistency. That book is The Intelligent Investor, first published in 1949, and Buffett has described it as by far the best book on investing ever written. Having applied its principles myself across my own…
- How i save 70% of my income
I save somewhere between fifty and eighty percent of my income depending on the month. When I tell people that, the first assumption is usually that I earn a lot or that I live a miserable, deprived existence, neither is true. The reason I can save at that rate is not income and it is not willpower. It is a system, and the foundation of that system is one thing that most people actively avoid doing: actually looking at where the money goes. I’m not talking about a vague sense of where your money is going, nor a rough mental estimate you have in your mind. A real, line by line, honest account…
- I read 20 books on financial literacy and self development, here's what they actually taught me.
I went through 20 of the most recommended financial and self development books so you don’t have to read all of them. And what I found wasn’t complicated. The same core lessons kept showing up over and over again, dressed in different stories and different examples. The truth about money isn’t hidden in some advanced strategy or complex financial instrument. It’s hiding in plain sight. In the way you think. In the habits you repeat. In the systems you build or fail to build. Here’s what the best 20 books actually taught me. Your Mindset About Money Shapes Everything The Psychology of Money by…
- If you want to be wealthy, read this.
You have been given a script your entire life. Save more, work hard, live below your means, max out your pension, and if you follow all of it faithfully enough for long enough, you will retire comfortably somewhere around sixty-five. That script works, in the narrow sense that it produces a result. But the result it produces is comfort, not wealth, and those two things are not the same destination. Genuinely wealthy people are not following a better version of that script. They are operating by an entirely different set of principles, ones that are invisible if you have never been shown them…
- You’re wasting 78% of your time (here’s how to fix it)
When I left my job earlier this year to run this newsletter full time, people assumed my days would be packed. Writing, researching, replying to emails, managing the business side of things. The assumption was that going full time would mean working more hours than before. The reality is that I do around two to four hours of genuinely productive work a day, and I get more done in those hours than most people get done in a full eight hour shift. And it’s not because I am particularly disciplined or unusually productive by nature, but because I stopped confusing being busy with actually moving…
- Why looking POOR is so important
Something took me longer to figure out than it should have, and I want to share it with you because I have a feeling you are making the same mistake I was. The people who look the wealthiest are often the most financially fragile. And the people actually building something real, the ones whose net worth grows in the background month after month, you would never pick them out of a crowd. They do not drive the car you would expect. They do not live in the postcode that matches their income. They just do not care. I spent years doing it completely backwards. Every income increase triggered an…
- One of the best personal finance book i have ever read
Majority of personal finance books are written like textbooks. Dense, formal, and structured in a way that assumes you already care deeply about the subject before you open the first page. The Wealthy Barber takes a completely different approach. It is written as a story, following a group of people learning about money from their local barber, Roy, who has quietly built genuine wealth on an ordinary income without inheritance or exceptional luck. The lessons emerge through conversation, debate, and the kind of back and forth that most financial education never allows for. The book has sold…
- Your brain is being eaten alive, and hobbies are the cure.
The average person now spends around 70 hours a week staring at a screen. That is ten hours a day, every day, given over to something that was designed specifically to keep you there. And the cost of that is not just wasted time. It is something considerably more serious than that. The two stage attack on your brain that nobody is talking about The first stage is social media. The platforms we use every day are engineered around one specific mechanism: the rapid dopamine hit. A like, a notification, a short video that ends before your attention wanders. Each one delivers a small burst of…
- Do this everytime you get paid (2026 paycheck routine)
The moment a paycheck lands is the most financially consequential moment of the month. It is the point at which every good intention either gets acted on or abandoned until next time. People let that moment pass without a system, which is why most people end up wondering where the money went rather than watching it compound into something. Here is the exact order of operations, from the moment you get paid to the moment everything is working for you. Step 1. Find your financial floor Before you can build anything, you need to know what your non-negotiable monthly costs actually are. Go…
- The one idea from Think and Grow Rich that changed how i think
Think and Grow Rich is not really a book about money. It is a book about the mechanics of how people achieve things, and why most people, despite wanting the same outcomes, never get there. Napoleon Hill spent nearly thirty years interviewing over five hundred of the most successful people of the twentieth century, names like Rockefeller, Carnegie, Ford, and Edison, trying to distil what separated them from everyone else. The result is one of the most read books in the history of personal development, and it rests on a single central idea. Everything significant you will ever accomplish has…
- 7 Money Rules You Should Know by 30
Money is only complicated until someone explains it properly. Most people aren’t bad with money. They’ve simply never been taught how it actually works. Schools rarely teach personal finance, so most of us learn through expensive mistakes, bad advice, or years of trial and error. The good news is that building wealth doesn’t require a finance degree or a six-figure income. It comes down to following a handful of simple rules consistently over a long period of time. The seven rules in this article won’t make you rich overnight, but they will help you avoid the mistakes that keep most people…
- How to save your first $10k: 8 saving hacks
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Data: Substack public leaderboards and publication archives, refreshed nightly, plus public beehiiv sitemaps and recommendation pages, refreshed weekly. Source for this page: The 5-Minute Finance. Subscriber counts are Substack’s own rounded public figures, so week-on-week changes move in steps. beehiiv audience sizes are self-reported by the publisher and are not verified. Last snapshot: Oct 21, 2026.