If You’re Poor, the Solution Isn’t to Save Money. It’s to Make More Money.
“A lot of poor people stay poor because they’re too cheap to get rich”
Talking about money gets my balls lit on fire.
“Easy for you to say, Richie Rich.” “How’s the Tesla? My car broke down again you son of a b*tch.”
But I’m more than qualified to talk about being poor, and I don’t judge people in a bad financial situation because I’ve been that person most of my life.
As a teenager, we lost our family home not once but twice. As an adult I was part of multiple failed startups. When I lost everything and worked in banking, I had to sell my car. A generous aunty gifted me theirs.
One of the first jobs in the bank I had put me in close proximity to people facing financial hardship. The stories were horrific.
One lady I met landed on my desk because her husband died of cancer.
There was a mixup with his estate. She got no money from his death. She had no savings. It was my job to see if she should be given a fee waiver on her insurance.
But often I’d meet customers in banking who’d try to do the right thing. They’d get a steady job, save money, be frugal, yet they never seemed to get ahead.
Somehow they’d always fall behind.
In some cases, all it took was the flu or a cough and they’d be right back to desperation again, unable to pay their bills. I tried to play the same money game at the start of my banking career.
I quickly learned it didn’t work.
Why saving money will never save you
Savers are losers. I don’t mean that as an insult.
What I mean is savers are literally losing money when they save because of:
Currency devaluation by governments
Annual increases in the cost of living
No real wage increases for employees
Higher taxes
No matter how hard you try and save, the leaky bucket called your savings is pissing away all your hard work. The solution is to make more money.
The roadblock to making more money that we don’t want to admit
Dan Koe says this:
“The underlying reason why people despise money is because it is a measure of value. Value is a measure of how many people support and care about your creations.
Getting paid for the amount of work you do doesn’t make sense. Getting paid for the amount of value you provide does, and that’s how reality works.
You may not like it, and it may not be completely pure or holy (because nothing is, creation is counterbalanced with destruction), but those who are richer than you are, by definition, more valuable than you, and that pisses you off.”
Becoming more valuable is the solution, but when we hear it, it sounds like an insult. So, our ego tells us to ignore the advice and stick our middle finger in the air.
When you take a step back and don’t get so easily offended, the obvious next step is to increase your value. It takes a learning mindset to do this.
It’s the wisdom that we don’t know what we don’t know, and if we’re willing to fix the knowledge gaps, it’s inevitable we’ll find the solution to the great money problem.
Don’t act so smart that you refuse to learn, add new skills, and increase your value. Being humble is crucial to financial freedom. It’s okay not to have the answer. What’s important is, are you wiling to do something about it?
Money problems are a value problem
You either increase your value to make more money or have your current value continue to diminish, and the problem gets worse.
It sounds harsh but that’s what I’ve learned working in business & finance.
How to make more money without being a financial guru
Once you come to the realization that the solution is to make more money, everything gets easier.
1. Spend money to make money
“A lot of poor people stay poor because they’re too cheap to get rich” – Alex Hormozi
This quote always gets to me.
One of the best ways to find out what you don’t know is to pay people who’ve already solved the problem. I didn’t do this because I said to myself, “Well, when I make more money, then I can pay people for help.”
This was a toxic mindset that kept me broke, and the financial gurus rarely say you have to spend money to make more money. But…
Good help isn’t free. And drowning in more free information likely isn’t the answer.
The best analogy is real estate. You can’t make money in real estate unless you invest money to buy properties, then use it to collect money from the tenant. If the barrier to entry was free, we’d all be billionaire real estate investors.
The better option is to reallocate money.
It’s to steal money from yourself to invest it in other areas where the opportunity to make more money exists. When I hit hard times I took most of the money I earned and invested it into education and getting help.
Here’s what no one tells you:
It requires a radical drop in spending. And that’s gonna hurt your ego.
For me, I had to live with my parents for a bit to save even more money than normal, so I’d have the cash to invest in making more money.
I also sold my car and took trains everywhere to speed up the process. And I didn’t buy new clothes for several years.
Most people won’t make sacrifices or downgrade their life.They’ll just say, “I don’t have enough money to do this or try that.” We don’t want to downgrade because we’re worried what friends, family, or strangers will think.
But if you can dare forget about what other people think, you can make the big choices to downgrade expenses faster & reinvest the cash into money-making activities.
If you’re too cheap to invest in yourself, you’ll never make more money or experience any level of wealth. The one area not to be cheap with is investing in yourself.
2. Increase your value by doing this
Your value used to be determined by getting one niche skill.
We’d go to university, learn about that one skill for 4 years, then use the skill for life. Those days are dead. You now need to be a generalist to survive in the fast-moving world dominated by tech.
Your ability to master several skills and combine them into a skill stack increases your value faster. So if money is a problem, it’s a huge red flag telling you to rebuild your skill stack.
This requires:
Unlearning old skills that are no longer relevant
Adding new skills to your skill stack
Maybe even building a brand new skill stack
Stop clenching onto the past. Skills are the missing income-increaser people have ignored, not pay rises or swearing at billionaires.
3. Use your mind not your time
“Wealth is the product of man’s capacity to think. There are no evil thoughts except one: the refusal to think.” – Ayn Rand
How you think determines your level of wealth.
It’s taboo to say this but it’s true. Wealth is a mindset. The answers exist. There are billions of people online. Trillions of dollars flow through the internet every day. Despite what the average person thinks, there’s always enough money.
Enough supply of money is never the problem.
So to navigate through the maze and claim enough of that money for yourself, it’s simply a thinking game.
What screws up our thinking is:
News
Politics
TikTok
Junk food content (instagram)
If you can cleanse yourself of this mental garbage, it’s easier to think clearly. Working harder and trading more of your time for money doesn’t work.
Work on your thinking. Challenge how you see the world. Dare to change it.
4. Making more money is a spiritual and mental process that’s disguised as needing a financial education
The hard part I’ve found with money is it often feels like it’s solely a knowledge gap.
But even when the knowledge is right in front of you, it doesn’t mean you’ll take the time to access it or put it into action.
I’ve learned that mastering money is a combination of mastering your psychology, and bizarrely, going through a spiritual process.
I went through a deep spiritual process. I rarely talk about it because it sounds woo-woo. It started with going to church. That ended in tears when I learned the founders of this particular church were using money in dishonest ways.
After that, through meditation and days spent in silence, I became wired into my own mind. What I saw disgusted me. I spoke to myself in my head worse than a murderer speaks to their victim right before they chop their head off in a rage.
I read many spiritual books along the way, too. It taught me I’m not special and I’m a tiny ant living on an earth that is a drop in the ocean when compared to the entire galaxy.
By lowering my significance I ditched the victim mindset.
This led me to learn about energy and the human body. I discovered money is energy, and it’s the same energy I have in my body. When the scientific link between the two is made, it becomes easier to attract more monetary energy.
This takes a physical form when you start to talk to a customers at your job or a business you establish. I realized…
Humans buy when the energy is high. They buy when the energy is right. If the energy is off, customers don’t buy so money isn’t generated.Through this spiritual journey I stumbled across the core problems all humans face. I realized I’d faced all of them too. This gave me a form of universal compassion that helped me communicate better and, therefore, make more money.
Bottom line: if you’re spiritually broken, people won’t give you money.
Even if you make more money, it’s not a guarantee of financial freedom
Wait, what?!
The path to making more money can solve all of your money problems. The challenge is even if you’re a perfect little choir boy, pay all your taxes and do everything right, you can still lose all your money. It’s crucial to know this outcome is real.
You could become wealthy, then go broke again.
The savior is that if you develop the right skill stack, become a person of value, program your psychology right, have high energy and master spirituality, when the money goes away, you’ll have everything you need to make it all right back again.
Stop trying to save money. Focus on making more money. (None of this article is financial advice).
Don’t torpedo your 2025 goals before it even starts.
In 2025, I want to help you:
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The spirituality part hit me hard.
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