Books · Money
Book summary and verdict
The Richest Man in Babylon
The ancient secret is saving ten percent before you touch it, because the biggest threat to your future isn't inflation or Wall Street. It's you, awake at midnight, deciding a pizza oven is basically an investment because you already own flour.
Should you read it?
Read it if saving means checking what survived the month, because it gives you a simple system: move money first, then live on the rest. Skip it if you already automate saving and investing. You know the trick. Now you just have richer ways to panic.
L.I save ten percent before I can touch it. Before investing, I ask who gets paid if I lose. Anyone who says “let’s not be negative” is already spending it.
The ideas
I · Keep
“Keep ten percent of every paycheck, before your personality finds out.”
Save ten percent the second you get paid. Leave it in checking and by Friday it has become a lamp you hate.
The idea is painfully simple: when you get paid, move ten percent somewhere safe before the bills and your little appetites start making their case. Leave it in checking and nothing dramatic happens. You just slowly eat your emergency fund in delivery fees.
That sounds insultingly obvious until payday, when the money arrives and immediately starts visiting people it likes better. The landlord gets paid. The electricity company gets paid. Netflix gets paid. Some app you downloaded in 2022 to identify plants gets paid.
You earned the entire paycheck, and somehow you’re the only person it refuses to make eye contact with.
L.Move it on payday. You are very convincing near a checkout button.
Put it somewhere separate, ideally somewhere you don’t keep checking, because looking at savings creates ideas. You see eight hundred dollars sitting there, and suddenly your brain becomes an entrepreneur.
“I saved an emergency fund, then immediately developed a motorcycle emergency.”
An emergency fund means the refrigerator can die without taking your nervous system with it.
II · Grow
“Save some, spend less, invest carefully, avoid disaster, earn more. That’s not a plan. That’s what a rich man tells you after asking why you chose to be poor.”
The rest of this idea is in the app.
III · Guard
“Do not take investment advice from a man who learned finance yesterday and bought a ring light today.”
The rest of this idea is in the app.
IV · Repay
Save ten percent. Pay debt with twenty. Live on seventy. Your paycheck now has adult supervision.
The rest of this idea is in the app.
What to actually do
Open your banking app. Set up an automatic transfer for payday.
Smaller: Ten percent if you can manage it. One percent if ten percent is currently hilarious.
L.Move the money before daily life gets a chance to make a case for it.
On payday, automatically move ten percent into a separate savings account.
Smaller: Do not attach a debit card or create an easy shortcut back to checking.
L.Then stop staring at the balance, because your brain will begin explaining why ordinary purchases are emergencies. By lunch, pasta delivery is medical care.
Tonight, list every debt, interest rate, and minimum payment.
Smaller: Choose either the smallest balance or the highest interest rate, then automate the payment.
L.Use the exact balances. This is not the moment to round down because the truth has been under a lot of stress. The lender kept the real number.
Open your recurring payments and cancel one thing you forgot you were funding.
Smaller: Start with the app you downloaded in 2022 to identify plants.
L.The plant knows what it is. You can let it go.
Still in the app
- What happened when people tried them
- Bullshit?
- Where readers disagree
- The one thing worth remembering
The rest of this book is in the app.
Skip the Book reads the self-help books so you don't have to: what each one argues, what happened when real people tried it, which claims are exaggerated, and what to do tonight. 130 books and counting, new ones most days.
Get it on the App StoreFor iPhone and iPad. Three books free, no account.
