Let's be honest. Personal Finance is a bit of chore. It ranks somewhere above doing the dishes but above laundry for me. Writing about it isn't that thrilling, and reading about it is usually even worse. When deciding to read about personal finance it is either to confirm that what you're doing is correct, or because you have absolutely no clue why there is no money left in the bank at the end of the month.

I started of this year by reading Ramit Sethi's first book I Will Teach You To Be Rich. He does a great job of keeping the topic interesting and giving solid financial advice at the same time. Sethi graduated from Stanford University in 2005, and has a venture-backed startup as well as a personal finance blog that garners about 250,000 views a month. He says that he got interested in personal finance while preparing to go the college, "I applied to over 70 scholarships and I still remember my first one: They wrote the $2,000 check to me, which I promptly invested, losing 50% of it in a couple months. After that, I decided to learn about money so I didn’t lose the rest."

Sethi is an outlier, not many of us applied for scholarships, and even fewer would have thought to try growing the gift by investing it. The man is a natural at finding ways to efficiently earn money, and does a great job of explaining what he has learned to help others.

The key to what Sethi preaches is automation. He doesn't believe in willpower; the idea that if you want to do better with your money you will. Most of his advice centers on trying to keep you from hurting yourself financially. According to Sethi to majority of financial errors can be avoided by setting up automatic transfers the instant your money gets to your bank account so that spending it isn't even something that you think about.

There are many different ways to automate your money. You could go the high tech route via automatic transfers in online banking suites or low-tech with the envelope system. That is where you take your money and divide it into categorized envelopes. Then once you have spent the money in the envelope you are out of luck until the next month.

Advice like this, and more can be found on his blog, iwillteachyoutoberich.com, and you can read the first chapter of the book here. Let us know in the comments of any other books you’ve read that have helped you out with your own finances.