The Wealthiest People Just Mimic These Habits. Don't F*ck It Up.
This is how you become debt free and financially free
Rich people are horrible humans.
I know because I used to be their banker. They’d treat me like a doormat and walk all over me with their muddy shoes.
I’m not interested in being rich. I prefer the subtle difference of becoming wealthy. Wealth is where you have good health, strong relationships, plenty of free time, and enough money not to think about price tags.
What wealthy people don’t want you to know is they’re the biggest copycats in the world. All they did was observe the wealthy then copy their habits. It’s what I did.
Here are the habits to copy from wealthy people – don’ f*ck it up.
Choosing trial and error when it comes to money is stupid
Gordon Ramsay is a badass.
People worship him. He’s got so much confidence and seems unstoppable. In the late 1980s, Gordon became Marco Pierre White’s apprentice.
There’s a classic Youtube video showing Gordon working with Marco. Marco does all the talking and Gordon is a shy, timid kid. There’s nothing interesting about Gordon at all.
No yelling.
No swearing.
No salmon being thrown at chef’s heads.
You’d be fooled into thinking he’d become a waiter for the rest of his life.
Marco showed him in the Youtube video how to use the pasta rolling machine and Gordon was completely silent. He followed orders.
Gordon was subtly different to other chefs though.
He was a learning machine and was infinitely curious. By 1993 he became the head chef at a three-Michelin-starred restaurant. Now he’s chef royalty. His strategy was he learned from the best and stole their secrets.
I never understand people who want to attack their goals on their own and rely on trial and error. These people never get wealthy.
Trial and error leads to frustration that leads people to give up on their goals.
Figuring it out on your own is lonely. You waste years of your life guessing, when the formula is right in front of you.
The wealthiest people learn from other people’s mistakes. Get around wealthy people anyway you can, like Gordon Ramsay did.
(This article is for informational purposes only, it should not be considered financial, tax or legal advice. Consult a financial professional before making any major financial decisions.)
Spend less than your income
This one sounds obvious, yet most people break this habit.
If more money is leaving your bank account than entering, then Houston we have a big problem. Your financial life has essentially become a leaky bucket. Droplets of water are entering the bucket, but there’s a blazing waterfall leaking out the bottom.
This is how a lot of people live.
They don’t see the problem. They listen to endless money gurus. They research the latest stocks. But they never bother to solve this issue because their delusional thoughts make them think that someday their income will improve.
They don’t know how but they believe, as if it’s a section in the bible.
Blind faith is stupidity in disguise. Your financial position right now is the only thing you can rely on. Your spending must always be less than your income. If it’s not, then spending needs to be cut.
This isn’t easy but there’s no alternative. The biggest expense is housing. Moving further out of town is the easiest way to lower your biggest bill. The average person refuses to do it because they let inner-city convenience twist their thoughts.
Wealthy people earn at least 25% more money than they spend.
Know your numbers
You don’t know what you don’t know.
A few years back a friend insisted I set up a personal cash flow statement. It’s a fancy way of creating a real-time spreadsheet that shows money coming in, and money coming out.
Many of us are good at doing this once a year around tax time, but having a real-time cash flow is rare. I now have accounting software that tells me my entire financial history in one click.
Everything from this month’s expenses to the value of my financial assets and investments. If my personal cash flow changes by a millimeter, I instantly know about it and can quickly adjust course.
Action: create a real-time cashflow statement (otherwise, you’ll slowly let money disappear).
Let compounding change your life
When you have at least 25% more money after all expenses are paid, there’s money to invest. If you put excess money in a savings account, then inflation and currency debasement rot it away.
Wealthy people know that money has to be put to work through investing. When money is invested correctly in a diversified portfolio of simple assets, like stocks and real estate, you access the power of compounding.
Compounding definition:
"Earning returns on both your original investment and on returns you received previously."I call it money making more money.
Without the power of compounding working in your favor, the only alternative is to work like a dog and trade time for more money. This is the default path, and it leads to disappointment and broken families.
Learn from masters, not amateurs
Wealthy people are good at spotting talent.
They understand that no human can do everything. Tasks need to be outsourced and finding good people is a crucial skill. The same applies to mentors and teachers. Finding good ones is a wealth hack.
Earlier today I spoke to a young man in Melbourne, Australia. He wanted to learn how to write online. He shared with me a list of people he was learning from.
One has 2300 X followers.
Another is giving Substack advice with less than 100 paid subscribers.
And he's getting online business advice from a cool guy named Brandon who’s in his first year of selling information products.
He told me my services weren’t needed.
Problem: he’s learning from f*cking morons who will happily take his money but have no real social proof or proven strategies. But me, the guy with 1B+ content views and a 7-figure paycheck from writing isn’t worth the time.
I see this a lot. We mistakenly choose to learn from nice people or the ones who tell the best stories.
But just because someone is nice, doesn’t mean they can help you get moderately wealthy. The blind leading the blind is a bad strategy. It’s easier and cheaper to learn from the best.
Takeaway: learn from people with publicly available social proof, not supposed experts who talk a good game.
Get up stupidly early
This wealth hack pisses people off.
It’s cliche and sounds like hustle culture. Yet it works. I’m yet to meet a wealthy person who goes out partying every night and sleeps in until noon.
Money is a store of energy.You become wealthy when you have more stored energy than you need. If you don’t sleep right and eat like crap, how can you ever have an excess of energy stored up?
Waking up early gives you a headstart on the day. It primes your mind to think and act like a high performer. So … wake up early (like 6 AM) – especially if you work a job you’re trying to escape.
Read books
I thought I’d add another cliche Elon-Musk-morning-routine-habit. Why not?
Books changed my financial future. In 2011, I binge-read every major finance book. For the first time I learned who Warren Buffett was. I learned about the 1980s stock market boom. I understood what inflation (a.k.a theft) really is.
It was also the year I went hard with investing. All the money lessons got absorbed into my brain and changed my behavior. When I went to replace the car my Aunty gave me when I lost everything, I got stuck.
The new car was $30,000. I calculated how much that $30,00 would be worth if I invested it. The number was mind-blowing. So I kept my aunty’s car for 5 more years.
People judged me. One summer one of the biggest American tech company CEOs came to Australia for a visit. My boss took him and his top executives out for dinner to chat business and invited me along. They all got drunk except me.
At the end of the night, it came time to leave. They asked how I was getting home.
“I’m driving.”
“Can we catch a lift back to the city with you?”
I couldn’t say no. They all piled into my piece of crap car that my aunty gave me. The whole trip they joked about how bad the car was and how small it was. I didn’t give a f*ck. Why?
Because now I’m a millionaire.
That $30,000 I didn’t use to buy a car went into high growth tech company investments that are now worth ten times that. Short term pain, long term gain.
Have an unlimited budget for new skills
Skills determine the size of your income. Improved skills increase your income.
So why the hell would you treat self-education as an expense? I see this daily. People want to keep their expenses down so they don’t invest in coaching, courses, and masterminds that exponentially increase their income.
Makes no sense. It gets even stranger…
For most of us, when we invest in new skills it’s tax-deductible. I pay 50% tax on every dollar I make. So buying new skills lowers my tax bill.
Yet the average person still resists upgrading their skills, but has no issue upgrading their iPhone every year to get a 1% better camera than the last model.
Don’t follow the sheep off a cliff. Your self-education budget should be unlimited if you want to become a wealthy person who has free time and fewer obligations.
Tell me which of these wealth habits you loved the most and why in the comments.
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“Unlimited budget for new skills”. A light bulb moment if ever I had one. Thank you!
Great reminders, Tim.
Waking up early is certainly an underrated strategy: I still don't see enough people doing it.
For the last 7 years, this habit has genuinely improved my life. I wake with no alarm, naturally between 5am and 6am. This means, I'm typically sleeping by 10pm.
For a guy who used to go to bed at 2am, that's a massive change that I would recommend to everybody!