Cashing in on the American Dream: How to Retire at 35

Paul Terhorst's blastedly anti-consumerist guide to early retirement: save aggressively while young, put the money to work, cut your expenses to a student's standard of living, and you can 'retire at 35' instead of 65. Written in 1988 by a self-described middle-class American, it became a cult classic of the FIRE movement decades before the term existed.

Cuban has cited this book across interviews for forty years — he told Money he 'used to read this book' when he was getting started, and named it again in a Men's Health interview alongside The Only Investment Guide as his go-to. To a founder the appeal is the link between personal cash discipline and the freedom to take business risk: if you can live like a student and save, you don't need a big salary or an investor to make your first move, which is the only kind of independence that lets you win a negotiation.