Most people spend their entire lives working hard without ever building real wealth.
The difference between those who break through and those who don’t rarely comes down to intelligence or luck. It comes down to the rules they live by.
Here are 14 rules of money that took me from broke to rich.
1. Spend Less Than You Make
It sounds obvious. It’s rarely practiced.
Dave Ramsey puts it simply: act your wage.
Meaning, live proportionate to what you actually earn.
Not what your friends drive. Not the Instagram version of your life.
As the saying goes… it’s not what you make, it’s what you keep.
Start here: 50% of income to needs, 30% to wants, and 20% to savings.
The goal, especially early on, is to live off as little as possible and reinvest the rest.
In yourself. In your skills. In your business. In your future.
2. Pay Yourself First
Broke people spend and then save what’s left.
Rich people save and then spend what’s left.
Here’s the shift: you are the most important asset in your financial life. Not a house. Not a car. Not a stock portfolio. YOU.
When you underpay yourself, you end up trading time for money just to cover basics — spending your Saturday doing laundry instead of working on the thing that could make you rich.
The better equation is:
Invest time in building skills → earn more → buy back time → invest that time in learning more skills → earn even more.
Pay yourself enough to protect your energy and your focus.
3. Assign Your Priorities
Oprah once said: you can have it all, just not all at once.
The greatest wealth-building mistake people make early on is trying to do everything at once.
Chasing multiple industries, multiple income streams, multiple skill sets.
The result is mediocrity spread thin.
Pick one lane. Go deep. Become world-class.
When you reach the top of your field, luck stops being random and starts being earned.
Don’t diversify until you’re already rich. Until then, focus is your greatest competitive advantage.
4. Have a Rip Cord Budget
Every serious business has a disaster recovery plan.
Your personal finances should too.
The rip cord budget means having enough liquid cash to survive a crisis without panic…
… so when things go sideways, you execute a plan instead of losing control.
On the business side, aim for at least 3 months of operating expenses in reserve.
On the personal side, keep 6 months of living costs liquid.
This isn’t about fear. It’s about freedom.
When you’ve decided how you’ll respond to a worst-case scenario?
You move faster and harder in the good times because you’ve made peace with the bad ones.
5. Give to Get
Frank Outlaw once said: no one ever became poor by giving.
Money is energy. When you hoard it, you signal to yourself and to the world that it’s scarce.
But when you circulate it (investing, spending intentionally, giving generously), it creates momentum.
More opportunities. More returns. More flow.
This isn’t magical thinking. It’s practical.
The more you invest in people, in businesses, in ideas, the more you learn, the more you grow, the more comes back.
6. Minimize Borrowing
Robert Kiyosaki wrote that the only difference between a rich person and a poor person is how they use debt.
Borrowing to fund a lifestyle upgrade — furniture, cars, vacations — is a trap.
You end up paying four times the price for things that don’t generate a single dollar of return.
Borrowing to invest in yourself, your skills, or a business with clear ROI potential? That’s leverage.
Take small shots before you fire cannonballs.
Test investments at a small scale, understand what returns to expect, then scale what works.
And if you can’t afford something? Go make more money.
7. Analyze the Risk/Return Ratio
Warren Buffett said it plainly: risk comes from not knowing what you’re doing.
Before making any investment, map it on a simple grid:
Risk on one axis, return on the other. High risk, high return (Bitcoin). Low risk, low return (index funds). High risk, low return — avoid entirely.
The sweet spot is low downside, uncapped upside.
They’re deals designed so you can only lose a little if it tanks, but win big if it pops.
Learn to see opportunities through that lens.
8. Don’t Fear Money
Every person carries money beliefs they picked up in childhood.
Some believe that rich people are greedy. That wanting wealth is shameful. That they don’t deserve it.
These beliefs work against every financial decision you make.
If you secretly believe rich people are bad, you will unconsciously avoid becoming one.
Work through those beliefs by asking yourself if they’re actually true, or just a story you keep telling yourself.
Money is never the problem.
It’s always a mindset problem that shows up in your bank account.
9. Avoid Lifestyle Creep
The moment money starts coming in, the temptation is to spend it.
A new car. A bigger apartment. Better watches. Better restaurants. Better everything.
This is lifestyle creep… and it destroys wealth before it ever has a chance to compound.
The game, especially early on, is to live off as little as possible for as long as possible.
Not to suffer but to stay hungry, to keep reinvesting, to let the machine build before you take from it.
Delayed gratification is more powerful than compound interest.
Instead of buying a BMW, invest in something that could buy you ten BMWs in five years.
Most wealthy people, even at the top, live on a fraction of what they earn.
The money does more work out in the world than it ever does sitting in a driveway.
10. Build a Personal P&L
The wealthiest people don’t wing it. They track everything.
You don’t need to hire a family office manager to start.
You need a simple profit and loss statement for your life: what comes in, what goes out, what’s left.
Get rigorous here.
The discipline you build managing small sums is what scales when the numbers get bigger.
11. High Tides Raise All Boats
Money at scale is a team sport.
One of the most common mistakes ambitious people make is hiring down, bringing in less capable people because they feel less threatening.
The logic is backwards. B’s and C’s don’t protect your A’s… they drive them away.
Invest in the people around you. Train them. Understand their goals.
Make your vision big enough that people see their own dreams inside of it.
When people feel like they’re growing, they stay.
When the tide rises, every boat in the harbour rises with it.
12. Money Is a Tool, Not the Goal
Henry Ford said: money is like an arm or a leg… use it or lose it.
Many people spend their twenties and thirties chasing wealth, only to reach it and feel empty.
That’s because money should have never been the point. It’s a tool, not a destination.
The point of money is to buy you time.
- Time to do meaningful work.
- Time to be with people you love.
- Time to build things that matter.
If every financial decision you make is driven mainly by money, money becomes your master.
When it’s just a tool in service of a bigger purpose, you get to stay free.
13. Your Network Is Your Net Worth
You become the average of the five people you let influence you.
That means you have agency. Upgrade your relationships deliberately.
Seek rooms where you feel like an imposter. Where the people around you are doing things that seem just out of reach.
That discomfort is growth.
And when your network includes people playing at a higher level?
Opportunities come to you that would never find you otherwise.
14. Define Your Why
Dark energy — proving doubters wrong, chasing validation, escaping a difficult past — can get you started.
It’s a powerful fuel. But it burns heavy, and it burns out.
To sustain long-term success, you need light energy:
A purpose that pulls you forward rather than a fear that pushes you.
Your why has to be bigger than money, bigger than status, bigger than any single achievement.
When you know WHY you’re building the dream, everything gets easier.
Decisions become clearer. Sacrifices feel worth it. And the money tends to follow.
-DM