"Your Money" by Carl Richards

If you want to find a relaxed approach to planning your finances, Carl Richards has it for you, complete with 101 simple sketches: Your Money.

It's an approach Richards employed as a financial writer for the New York Times for 10 years: using boxes, circles, and squiggly lines to illustrate basic messages about money.

Two circles, one marked "things that matter," the other, "things I can control." The part where they intersect is darkened in with the message: "what I try to focus on."

Richards said this is the first book on financial planning he's written in 11 years, and he wanted to keep it simple. So there are lots of pithy commentaries and plenty of white space to go along with the sketches that Richards is known for.

Want a sample of chapter titles? There's "The Power of Pause," "Goals Are Guesses," and "Boring Pays Off."

Richards' basic advice is to stay calm when it comes to handling money, a subject that no two people think about the same way, he notes.

Don't worry about other people's fortunes, either, and understand that there's something he categorizes as financial pornography, those brazen media calls to action that can throw you off your game.

He advocates budgeting simply so you know where you stand--not as some kind of punishment designed to force absolute accountability. 

Here's one more Richards ditty: the most powerful financial tool isn't math--it's your humanity.