Best-selling book · 2025
Unraveling Your Relationship with Money
Ditch Your Money Trauma So You Can Live an Abundant Life
This isn't another book telling you to try harder, spend less, or become a completely different person by Monday. It's about understanding why money means what it means to you — and why knowing the rules has never been the whole answer.
DO THIS?
ME THAT?
TRYING TO PROVE?
READ ME
The big idea
You can know everything about money and still have a very complicated relationship with it.
Because money gets tangled up with safety, identity, achievement, family, shame, desire, control, and what we think a successful life is supposed to look like.
This book is about untangling that.
What's inside
Four ways to
look underneath
the numbers.
The book starts where most financial advice stops: with the messages, feelings, identity, and behavior underneath what you do with money.
Where Your Money Story Came From
The messages, memories, fears, and beliefs you absorbed before you ever had your own bank account.
Why Knowing Better Doesn't Fix It
Why financial behavior isn't just math — and why smart people still spend, avoid, save, or control money in ways they don't fully understand.
What You're Actually Trying to Feel
Safety. Relief. Enoughness. Belonging. Success. Control. The emotional job money may be doing without you realizing it.
Rewrite What Money Gets to Mean
Decide which stories still belong to you and build a relationship with money that actually fits the life you want now.
Book jacket receipts
The kind of things you hope people say about your book.
"I don't think anyone has had more public conversations helping people untangle their money stories than Shannah Game, and now she's packaged her wisdom into this generous, transformative guide for us all."Carl Richards New York Times Sketch Guy Columnist, author of The Behavior Gap and The One-Page Financial Plan
"Shannah brilliantly unravels the strange and complex relationship we have with money. As someone who inherited a money mindset of fear and lack, Shannah's guidance has elevated my soul's self-worth, and is the balm to embracing a flourishing relationship with money."J Kelly Hoey Author, Build Your Dream Network: Forging Powerful Relationships in a Hyper-Connected World
This book is for you if...
The numbers may be real. They're just not the whole problem.
- ✓You've tried the apps, budgets, rules, or systems — and somehow the same patterns keep coming back.
- ✓You make decent or even very good money and still don't feel as safe as you thought you would.
- ✓You keep wondering why you do things with money that make no sense on paper.
- ✓Money brings up shame, anxiety, avoidance, control, or a whole lot of overthinking.
- ✓You're in a transition — midlife, work, caregiving, starting over — and your old definition of success doesn't fit like it used to.
- ✓You want to build a relationship with money that belongs to you, not one you inherited.
Why I wrote it
I was a CFP® who knew the rules — and still hid from my own receipts.
I spent years helping other people understand money while folding my own ATM receipts into tiny paper cranes and burying them in my bag so I wouldn't have to look at them.
That disconnect changed the questions I was asking. I stopped wondering only, “What should someone do with money?” and started asking, “What is happening underneath what they're doing?”
Unraveling came out of more than twenty years of working in money, teaching, interviewing people, hosting a podcast, and having to confront the fact that financial knowledge matters — but it isn't the whole answer.
This is the book I wish I'd had before I learned to make a receipt disappear.
Read my full story
Book clubs · bulk orders · events
A money book people might actually want to talk about.
Want to read Unraveling with your team, book club, community, event audience, or organization? Ask about bulk orders, book conversations, audience copies, and pairing the book with a talk or workshop.
Ready to unravel?
Your money story started long before you knew what a budget was.
You're allowed to decide what happens next. Unraveling Your Relationship with Money is available wherever books are sold.