Top 10 Rules for Money Management

I want you to think about something, in your entire life, how much money have you ever made?

Let me explain what I mean by that. When you were 15 years old, you probably got your first cheque ever for maybe mowing lawns or helping out with yard work or something like that, and you probably made around $100 if that, right? Until right now, I don’t know if you’re 25 years old, etc., in your entire life, how much money total has passed through your hands, maybe you made $50,000 last year at 25 years old, and maybe the first time you ever got a cheque in your entire life or any amount of money was when you were 13 years old mowing the lawn for your parents. So I want you to add up every single one of those numbers since you were 13 years old until you’re right now, and I want you to come up with a single number. Now, that number might be 1,00,000; it might be a million, it might be 10 million.

It depends on who you are, how much money you make and how old you are? But the real question is this, How much money of that total do you actually have in your wallet? How much money of that total number do you actually have saved inside your bank account or inside of investments?

And suppose you’re not happy with this question, and it’s straightforward. In that case, the reason that you don’t have a lot of money left or a lot of money saved is that you don’t understand the rules of money and today I’m going to be talking about the 10 rules of money that you need to master if you want to start making more money, but more importantly, actually keeping more money.

These are the rules that I’ve personally followed, and obviously, I’ve made a lot of mistakes, and I’ve cost myself a ton of money making those mistakes. But the good thing about this article is if you read it until the end, you can profit from all of the mistakes I’ve made. You can apply them to your own life so that you can avoid those same mistakes that cost me a ton of money so they won’t cost you a penny, and I promise you if you understand, not memorize but understand all 10 rules, you’re going to be well on your way to mastering money.

Rule №1: Money is a Game

Rule number one is the most important one, and that is that money is a game, and the sooner you stop trying to fight it, the sooner you’ll actually start to realize that money is a game, and like every game, you'll master, right? If I’ve played the game a thousand times and you’ve only played the game once, I’m obviously much more likely to win at that game.

It’s like a video game. It’s like a board game. It’s like anything else. The more times you play, the more practice you get, the better you become at it, and so you can choose to think about this in one of two ways. You can think, “Oh, it’s a game, right? I’m always going to lose,” or you can think, “Oh, it’s a game!” and like any game, it can be learned, and it can be mastered. So you can be like some people will say, “Oh, you know, they got lucky or they’re just too smart, right? That’s why they’re rich.” No!, it’s not like that. Money is a game; it can be learned, it can be mastered like anything else. You have to know the rules.

So the great thing about the money game is that it can be learned. So many people fight it, so many people have problems with it, and they say, “Oh, you know, well, they became rich because they had rich family or they had you know, they are too smart.” No!, money is a game, and it can be learned, and it can be master.

Rule №2: Don’t waste money.

There’s absolutely no reason in the world to fly first class until you have 10 million dollars in the bank. I see so many people spending $2000, $3000 on a first-class flight; you can get the same flight for $300, not sitting in first class.

Listen, do you know how many times that I personally have ever paid for first class? Because the answer is zero. I literally have never paid for first-class in my entire life, and it was a particular reason why? And the reason is that I did the math. If the first-class flight costs $2000 and I fly ten times a month, that’s 20 grand. If I’ve to fly ten times a month for $300, that’s 3 grand.

That’s literally a $17,000 difference, and if I add that up for the entire year for 12 months, right? It’s over $2,00,000 wasted that I literally could use to buy marketers. I could buy, you know, more products for my house. I could literally upgrade software, buy new laptops, right? There are so many different better uses of that money. So the rule is, Do not waste money on things you don’t need until you have at least 10 million dollars in the bank and at that point, if you want to fly first class, then be a money saver.

Rule №3: Get Ready for Crisis

When there’s a crisis, everything goes on sale. CNN, Fox News, Dave Ramsey, all these people get paid to do one thing. They literally get paid to sell crises. People get afraid and think it’s the end of the world, and finally, everything is going to collapse, right? The real estate market is going to collapse; the stock market is going to collapse. Nothing’s ever going to recover. Literally, it’s the end of the world.

Just like in 2008 when the market fell intensely, right? It felt all the way down to something like 6000 points. But now, the market has absolutely exploded back up to over 35000 points for the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Imagine if you had left your money in just 12 years ago, right? You would have gone from 6000 points to over 35000 over a six times return, even at the very bottom of the worst financial crisis in years. So those who have cash set aside for when crises take place are the people who truly win the game of money because every time a crisis takes place, a lot of people get extremely wealthy because literally, everything becomes on sale, right?

Houses become half off; cars become half off of their exotics. Or all types of things that wealthy people buy and can make extreme amounts of money on literally go half price because everyone thinks that the world is ending, and so it’s vital to understand that the world is not ending, right? The world has not ended for hundreds and hundreds and thousands of years. So there’s no reason for you to believe that the world is going to end, and if the world is going to end, then money doesn’t matter at all anyways.

So a lot of people are saying that the market is about to tank again. I don’t know if it’s going to tank again this year or next year, or in five years, but I do know that it’s going to tank in the next 20 years, and you better believe that I am going to be 100% ready for when that takes place. So you have to be ready for it also.

Rule №4: Follow the best.

What I mean by that is to study the smartest investors. Studying the smartest investors who literally dedicate their entire lives to investing and to understanding how money works and how the economy works. You can literally learn from a single book what someone has dedicated their entire life to, right?

And if they’re one of the best investors in the world, then they’re a billionaire. So why wouldn’t you take the time to read a book, write a summation of all of the knowledge of some of the smartest people in the world when it comes to the role of money, and then take those lessons that they tell you in the book and apply them to your own investment strategies and your own mentality and mindset, when it comes to money.

You’ll learn from their mindset, and nothing else actually portrays what someone’s doing with their money, then to look at what they actually invest in themselves. But what I like to do is look and see Warren Buffett actually invested in, right? What is Carl Icahn actually invested in? And if you can follow along with them, you know, in a smaller way, obviously, because most of us aren’t billionaires like those two, but we can follow along and make investments that make sense to you.

I don’t invest in utilities because I don’t understand utilities. I invest mainly in technology because I understand technology, know what companies have competitive barriers to entry, know what companies have monopolies, and know what companies will be around for the long term and what companies I don’t understand; I will never look at them. So what I do is I study the best investors, I learn why they do what they do, I look at what they actually do, what they’re investing their own personal money in, right? And then I use that to actually come up with my own investing strategy that is similar to theirs.

Rule №5: Do you and No one else.

What I mean by this is it’s a perilous game, right? Because money and happiness are two different things. They’re independent of one another. I know many rich people who are not very happy, so one of the quickest ways to not be a happy person is comparing your money situation to someone else’s, because if you made $10,000 this month for the first time, right? The most money you’ve ever made in a month, but you learned that your neighbour made $1,00,000, all of a sudden, you’re not happy about making that $10,000 anymore.

You’re sad comparing yourself making less than your neighbour, and so the best thing you can do is focus on yourself, focus on your business, compare only yourself to your past self. Never compare yourself to other people. If you focus all of your attention on adding massive value to your customers, it’s going to pay off exponentially, and your vision might not be to go out and become the next billionaire, right?

Maybe you want to make a million dollars. If that’s your plan, stick to it. So focus on that, but don’t go out there and constantly compare yourself to other people; that is how you become unhappy, and trust me, money is nothing if you’re not happy. I know a lot of rich people that are not happy. So you have to focus on yourself because you’re always going to be happy if you’re making incremental progress compared only against your own self in the past. So the point is, guys, never compare yourself to other people because you don’t know what their situation is, right? Maybe your neighbour, who is making $1,00,000, he’s been doing it for 50 years, he’s working 90 hour weeks, and he’s depressed. He might have more money, but he doesn’t have the same quality of life that you have. So never compare yourself to other people.

Rule no.6: Befriend Moneymakers.

I’ll tell you why that is because if you’re around other people who are making money, you’re going to make money, and that’s just the way it is. If you’re around entirely, a bunch of people that don’t know anything about money and don’t want to make money, you’re not going to make money. So that’s also how it is.

A quote that I love in business is “You are the sum of the five people that you spend the most time with,” and that is entirely 100% true, and if you spend the most time with five people that know nothing about money, you’re also going to know nothing about money probably. But if you spend the most time with five people who know a lot about money and make a lot of money, I promise you that you will make more money.

Rule №7: Money doesn’t make you Happy

This is an essential one because there’s a lot of misconception here. After all, money doesn’t make you happy directly, and that’s 100% true because if money did make you happy and every rich person I know would be inherently happy, that’s actually not how it is in the real world. But it’s also naive to think that money does not increase someone’s quality of life.

Money allows you never to experience the stress of worrying about a late rent payment or worrying about what you’re going to eat that night. But it’s also so critical to understand that money cannot buy you happiness, because if your happiness is directly linked to your money, then I promise you, you are not going to be a happy person because the money comes and goes and if you allow your happiness to be directly linked to the amount of money that you’re making, then your happiness is going to go right up and down with it.

Rule №8: Leverage

The only difference between a king and a peasant is positioning and leverage. Everything is about leverage, but I’m talking about leverage in the business period. Leverage in a negotiation to get a better deal, leverage to get more clients, leverage to get more sales, leverage to sell more products, right? Everything is leverage.

Positioning means that if I’m going to go work at a company, I will put myself in the position actually to own some equity. So if that company ever goes public or starts earning a ton of money and gets bought out privately, then I’m actually going to be in the position to make a huge amount of money from that. So you’ve got to position yourself to make the most money. So with your income, with your investments, with everything you do, if you put yourself in the right position, the best position to potentially make the most money, you’re going to make the most money. But you have to put yourself in that position, and you have to use your leverage with money to get there.

Rule №9: Strategic Partnerships.

Strategic partnerships basically mean working with people who will have a lot of synergy with your company, and what I mean by that is you want to work with people who are making a lot of money. You want to work with people who are going to make you a lot of money, right? So when everyone’s incentives are aligned, that’s when a business truly works, when I’m going to make someone a lot of money. They’re going to make me a lot of money, that is a strategic partnership when it’s good for both of us, and that is when things really get interesting, and everyone starts to make a lot of money.

Rule №10: Grab it when it comes to you.

This is probably the most important one to me because the money comes the fastest when you don’t actually seek it, and let me explain what I mean by that.

When was I desperate for money, right? When I needed money the most, it seemed like it was the hardest thing in the world to earn even a single dollar. I needed money now, which made it so much harder to get; think about it from a dating perspective if you look desperate and need it now, right? You look so much less attractive to the person that you’re on a date with, right? No one wants to go on a date with someone desperate.

It the same thing with money. If you desperately seek it, it becomes infinitely harder actually to get. But if you concentrate instead on adding value, whether it’s adding value to your customers or supplying a superior product or service or adding better customer service when you focus on impact and customer experience and adding value, the funniest thing happened, more money than you could ever dream of starts to pour directly into your bank account.

Conclusion

So with the 10 rules of money, you’re well on your way to actually starting to master money. If you enjoyed this article, then I love it and make sure that you drop a comment below telling me your thoughts on money and whether or not you have mastered the game of money. And until next time, have your hustling.

Thanks for Reading!