Behavioural finance is rising ever higher on the wealth management agenda, with various firms looking to understand their clients’ attitudes and risk appetites much more fully than they were content to pre-crisis. But this whole movement is about more than fulfilling compliance requirements and forestalling mis-selling complaints. Wealth managers are rapidly coming to realise that now more than ever clients are seeing their investments in terms of how they will help them fulfill life goals. And it is this “holistic” approach to wealth which forms the ideological backbone of the latest book to land on the WealthBriefing newsdesk.

The Psychology of Wealth: Understand Your Relationship with Money is written not by an economist, nor even an investment guru. It does not profess to show readers how to get rich, nor in fact does it hold that immense wealth is in fact a route to happiness. Rather, it is an engaging and insightful look at the correlation between “inner riches” and its manifestation as financial wealth. What clinical psychologist Dr Charles Richards instead looks to identify are the qualities of self-esteem and confidence which tend to go hand-in-hand with financial success.

The Psychology of Wealth also abounds with numerous examples of financial failure, examining why it is that one-third of all lottery winners end up losing it all due to “sudden wealth syndrome” and – pertinently for wealth managers – why the inheritors of massive riches often fail in the “race of life” and are made miserable by what their forbears strived so hard to attain.

By turns erudite and homely, this book features not only the insights of Dr Richards and various case studies, but also functions as a rattle through US economic history, including a dissection of the events which led up to the subprime-fuelled global meltdown of 2008. Interestingly, amid the finger-pointing still rife today, the book takes a refreshingly even-handed look at the crisis. Rather than unreservedly blaming loose attitudes towards debt for the maelstrom, it instead asks us to ensure that credit is used as a tool for long-term gain: that debt is productive rather than consumptive. The author in fact cites the New Hampshire statesman Daniel Webster, who said in 1834: “Credit is the vital air of the system  of modern commerce. It has done more, a thousand times, to enrich nations, than all the mines of all the world.” Wise words indeed.

In fact, The Psychology Of Wealth draws on the wisdom of all manner of people, from the aphorisms of business supremo Donald Trump to the “kitchen sink economics” of unsung grandmothers - all of which makes for a very entertaining read. Ranging from explorations of Jungian archetypes to musings on Asian versus "American apple pie" parenting, this book poses as many questions as it answers.

Hardcore mathematicians may bristle at some of the more “New Age” elements of The Psychology of Wealth, but the messages that it carries will resonate as much with the financial wizards of the world as with the man on the street. As one contributor puts it, “money tends not to solve personal problems; money solves money problems.” This book is, in essence, a handbook on the psychology of achievement – the practice of which happily tends to go hand-in-hand with monetary gain.

The Psychology of Wealth: Understand Your Relationship with Money by Dr Charles Richards is published by McGraw-Hill, priced £18.99.