Review of "Unapologetic Wealth" by Marcia Dawood

Score: 93/100 (9.3 out of 10)

What if the biggest thing standing between you and wealth is not your paycheck, but the story you keep telling yourself about money?

How much of your financial life is shaped by fear, guilt, and beliefs you never chose?

What if wealth is not about greed at all, but about finally giving yourself permission to live freely?

Unapologetic Wealth by Marcia Dawood is less a traditional money manual and more a mindset book about reclaiming your relationship with money. Dawood argues that many people, especially women, feel strange, ashamed, disconnected, or hesitant around money not because they are incapable, but because they inherited old beliefs, silence, and fear around it. She frames wealth not just as money in an account, but also as relationship wealth, time wealth, health wealth, creative wealth, and knowledge wealth.

A huge part of the book is about identifying the hidden stories people carry, such as “I’m not good with money,” “wanting more is selfish,” or “money should be handled by someone else.” Dawood says these beliefs often come from family patterns, social conditioning, and women’s long historical exclusion from full financial agency. She points to how recently many women gained basic financial rights and argues that this history still shapes modern confidence, risk tolerance, and self-permission.

She also introduces the idea of quiet money guilt, which is one of the strongest concepts in the book. This is the subtle guilt that shows up when you hesitate to spend on yourself, minimize your success, avoid asking for more, or stay small even when nobody is directly stopping you. The book treats that guilt not as a character flaw but as inherited emotional residue.

From there, the book pushes toward what Dawood calls financial fluidity. That means having a flexible, values-aligned relationship with money rather than a rigid, fear-based one. Money becomes a tool, not a moral scoreboard. The goal is to make choices with clarity and purpose, adjust as life changes, and use money to support the life you actually want.

Dawood widens the definition of wealth and argues that success should not be reduced to accumulation or appearances. She emphasizes that non-monetary forms of wealth can be just as real and that people often sacrifice health, joy, relationships, or meaning while chasing a narrower version of success that is not even theirs. She urges readers to define wealth for themselves, then use money intentionally to build a more aligned life.

We went into this book feeling very hyped and excited to learn how to make more money. We were stoked and hoping for a manual or guide of some sort--money advice that anyone can use. However, we were a bit disappointed to learn that this is more of a philosophical discussion about how badly women have been treated in the workplace and how much harder it has been for them to become wealthy (compared to men). It's more about how women have been financially limited throughout history and how they still (wrongfully) carry the ghost of that legacy, bearing self-limiting beliefs that money, wealth, high-paying positions, and financial independence aren't for them.

We wouldn't be so annoyed by this if somewhere on the cover it explicitly stated or even hinted that this was a book for women. However, the subtitle is Rewrite Your Money Story From Any Beginning, which implies the content should apply to everyone—male, female, and everyone in between.

So, you now have permission to be wealthy. Great!

But rather than giving readers a step-by-step blueprint for earning more, investing better, or building wealth in a concrete, tactical sense, the book spends most of its time examining beliefs, emotional baggage, guilt, and inherited stories around money. There is value in that, and some readers will absolutely connect with it, but we do think it is worth noting that this is not really a nuts-and-bolts guide to making more money so much as it is a book about reshaping how you think and feel about wealth, which is a very Robert-Kiyosaki-esque-way of viewing money and finance. If you read Rich Dad, Poor Dad, you get the general premise already: Money is friend, money not enemy.

That's not to say we didn't like the book or that we didn't appreciate aspects of it. Some of the stories that Dawood tells are great, and (for the most part) serve the purpose of advancing the message. These stories are the highlights of the book.

For example, Dawood shares a strong personal story about being promoted into a department leadership role but not being given the vice president title that the man before her had held in that same position. She was told she had to “earn” a title attached to a job she was already doing, and that story is one of the book’s clearest and most effective examples of how women are sometimes expected to prove themselves twice over for the same recognition. In a sense, you can kinda tell that this experience might be the crux and inspiration behind this book. Many of us have experienced something like this: having someone be treated more favorably than us or being treated unfairly. How can you be on the Jedi Council without being a Master? It's a universal feeling.

There is another fascinating story about Payless Shoes creating a fake luxury brand called "Palessi" and getting people to pay hundreds of dollars for the exact same shoes they would have ignored in a discount store. There is also a similar story about people rating two identical cakes differently simply because one was labeled much more expensive than the other. Those examples are some of the most memorable in the book because they clearly show how much perceived value, status, branding, and presentation shape the way people think about money and worth.

Check it out on Amazon!