There’s a word we all need to live by.

It could alleviate the stress that many parents feel every time their darling child’s birthday comes around. It would put an end to the need to ever say “Bridezilla.” It might mean the cancellation of Bravo’s successful “Real Housewives” television series featuring seemingly wealthy women with too much makeup and too tight clothes prancing around with overpriced Prada, Louis Vuitton, Gucci, Versace whatevers.

It could have saved us from the recession.

“Enough.”

That’s the word.

This two-syllable word drew me to the Color of Money Book Club selection for September. It’s the title of John C. Bogle’s latest work, “Enough: True Measures of Money, Business, and Life” (Wiley, $24.95).

Bogle is the founder of the Vanguard Group, which he created in 1974. In the interest of full disclosure, I own Vanguard mutual funds as part of my 401(k) plan and other investment portfolios. I’ve had the pleasure of appearing on the stage with Bogle. He strikes me as genuinely caring about the individual investor.

Bogle’s book may seem a pretentious choice at a time when many people are barely able to pay their mortgages or rent or medical expenses. Or they have been unemployed for so long that they’ve lost hope. But “Enough” is an insightful reminder of the danger of building an economy too dependent and dominated by the financial industry. Bogle laments that we’ve created a culture whose heroes are hedge fund managers and moneychangers whose reckless decisions have damaged so many companies, families and retirement portfolios.

Analysis and candor

“Enough” is divided into three sections: “Money,” “Business” and “Life.”

In the section on money, Bogle skewers his own kind — the investment community.

“On balance, the financial system subtracts value from our society,” he writes. “We have moved to a world where far too many of us seemingly no longer make anything; we’re merely trading pieces of paper, swapping stocks and bonds back and forth with one another, and paying our financial croupiers a veritable fortune. In the process, we have inevitably added even more costs by creating ever more complex financial derivatives in which huge and unfathomable risks have been built into the financial system.”

Amen. Hallelujah and all that jazz.

Because we no longer know what enough is, we are never satisfied. We are forever trading up or just trading — stocks, bonds, cars, homes, and even spouses — to achieve what we think is something better. This is especially true with our investment expectations.

“Enough” is just enough mixture of critical analysis of our financial system and common sense wisdom to help you become a better person and a better investor.