Virtue scores
Review
SECTION ONE Haley Sacks — known online as 'Mrs. Dow Jones' — wrote this book for the woman who has quietly accepted that money is something other people understand. The premise is direct: financial literacy is not a personality trait you either have or lack; it is a skill, and Sacks intends to teach it. Working through the mechanics of budgeting, debt, investing, retirement accounts, and negotiating salary, she builds a step-by-step case that any reader, regardless of income or prior knowledge, can begin building wealth today. The tone is deliberately unintimidating — Sacks translates the language of personal finance into the register of a frank conversation with a knowledgeable friend. The audience is primarily younger women who have felt excluded from or overwhelmed by financial planning, though the practical content applies broadly. The book's animating conviction is that financial ignorance is not neutral; it costs you, and the sooner you replace confusion with competence, the more of your future you own. SECTION TWO - **Created**: The book's core premise — that every person has the rational capacity to understand and govern their own finances — implicitly honors what Vitz, Nordling, and Titus describe as the person's dignity as a rational agent. Sacks refuses to treat financial competence as the province of a credentialed class; she locates it within the reach of ordinary human reason, a quiet affirmation of the imago Dei as intellectual dignity. - **Fallen**: Sacks describes the anxiety, avoidance, and shame that many readers bring to money — patterns that are not simple ignorance but disordered habits of thought and will. This maps onto the Fallen state's characteristic wound: the intellect clouded and the will weakened, so that even self-interested rational action (saving for one's own future) becomes difficult without deliberate re-formation. - **Redeemed**: The book's structure is itself a pedagogy of small, ordered acts — opening a retirement account, automating a savings transfer, tracking a spending category — that mirrors how Aquinas describes habit formation: not by one heroic act but by repeated, modest ones that gradually reshape the person's operative dispositions. In this sense the book points toward restoration through acquired virtue, even without naming it as such. - **Prudence (foresight)**: Sacks trains the reader to project consequences forward in time — to feel the weight of compound interest in both directions, to see a present spending choice as a future retirement balance. This is exactly the integral virtue of foresight that Aquinas places within prudence: the capacity to hold future goods before the will so that present action is ordered toward them. - **Prudence (household wisdom)**: The book's domain is domestic stewardship in the classical sense — managing the household's resources with care and skill. Its exercises in budgeting and debt reduction are exercises in what Aquinas called prudentia oeconomica, practical wisdom applied to the governance of one's own household. SECTION THREE Peterson's[^1] 'Maps of Meaning' offers an unexpected lens on this book's motivational structure: Peterson describes the corporate climber who holds a mental image of an ideal future self — respected, powerful, free of anxiety — and organizes every present action around closing the gap between present condition and that ideal. Sacks' reader occupies the same psychological posture, and the book functions as a tool for making that gap-closure deliberate rather than anxious. Where Peterson's analysis exposes the existential stakes of goal-directed striving, Sacks operationalizes it at the level of a checking account. Rothbard's[^2] account of time preference in 'Man, Economy and State' offers a complementary economic frame: every decision to save is a decision to discount present consumption in favor of a future good, and the strength of that discount — the reader's own rate of time preference — is precisely what Sacks' habit-formation exercises are designed to lower over time. A Catholic anthropological reading would push further than either Peterson or Rothbard: ordered financial prudence is good, but it remains an instrumental virtue until the reader asks what the accumulated wealth is finally for — a question neither this book nor its secular dialogue partners raise. ## References 1. Peterson, Jordan (1999). *Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief*. Chapter 2. — 'You are always comparing this present (unsatisfactory) condition to that of your ideal, which is you, increasingly respected, powerful, rich' 2. Rothbard, Murray (1962). *Man, Economy and State*. Chapter 1. — 'the higher the rate of discount, the lower the present value of the future good will be, and the greater the likelihood of abstaining from the investment'
✓ Strengths
- ✓The book treats financial literacy as a form of practical self-governance, connecting earning, saving, and investing to deliberate personal agency rather than passive luck — an implicit affirmation that the person is ordered toward purposive action.
- ✓Its accessible, demystifying tone acknowledges that financial confusion is often a barrier of formation rather than intelligence, and that ordinary people can acquire real competence through teachable steps — a form of docility directed at a concrete domain of life.
- ✓By addressing women specifically as economic agents responsible for their own futures, the book affirms the dignity and rational capacity of each person independent of social scripts that have historically excluded women from financial decision-making.
- ✓The emphasis on building habits around budgeting, investing, and goal-setting maps onto the Thomistic insight that virtue is formed through repeated acts — prudence in the household domain is cultivated by doing, not merely by knowing.
- ✓Sacks' framing of financial knowledge as a form of freedom — rather than mere wealth accumulation — gestures toward the Augustinian sense that ordered goods can serve a genuine human end, provided they are held with proper interior detachment.
⚠ Considerations
- ⚠The book's horizon appears to stop at financial security and personal wealth as terminal goods, without raising the question of what wealth is for — a teleological gap that Aquinas would flag, since prudence is ordered toward the final end of the person, not merely toward comfort or status.
- ⚠The aspiration encoded in the title 'Future Rich Person' risks framing the self primarily as an accumulating economic subject, which can reinforce what Vitz, Nordling, and Titus identify as the disordered self-referentiality of the Fallen state rather than redirecting desire toward genuine goods and others.
- ⚠Without any account of generosity, stewardship, or solidarity, the book may inadvertently form readers in a thin conception of justice — one that stops at personal financial order and does not extend to the common good or to the obligations that accompany wealth.