The 2 greatest money books ever written

Oh boy, I bet it’s something by Bill Gates or Warren Buffett, right? ‘Cause those guys know all about money.

Or, if you know me already, you probably think it’s a Dave Ramsey book. Better guess, but still not right.

Nope, the two greatest books on money ever written are:

The Three Little Pigs

And

The Tortoise and the Hare.

But I will credit Dave Ramsey with the idea for the second one. He does a talk where he describes having lunch with a billionaire mentor of his and the best advice he got from him was to read the Tortoise and the Hare.

"Not by the hair on my chinny chin chin."

So what do these two fairy tales have to do with money?

Very simple. Build your financial life like a brick house, and the big bad wolf can huff and puff all he wants. He won’t blow your house in.

And....it takes longer to build a house of out of bricks than it does out of straw or sticks.

Or as we read in Proverbs 28:20...”A faithful man will abound with blessings, but whoever hastens to be rich will not go unpunished.”

Or my favorite shorter version, “Get Rich Slow”.

If you combine the two stories, the tortoise would have built his house out of bricks. The hare would have built his house of straw.

So who is the big bad wolf?

"I'll huff and I'll puff and I'll blow your house in."

Big bad wolves come disguised as things like

• Pandemic shutdowns (I’m writing this in April of 2020, which will be a famous month in history.)

• Job loss even during “normal” economic times

• Natural disasters

• Devastating medical diagnoses

• ...and many other things that might affect only you and your family, or might affect all of society.

If you think you’ll get through life without a wolf ever huffing and puffing at you, you are sadly mistaken.

Slow and steady wins the race.

And who is the hare?

Maybe the hare is the neighbor family, the Joneses, that you’ve been tempted to try and keep up with, but who you just found out are being foreclosed on.

Or it’s that guy who seems to work from home all the time, doing something he calls “day trading”, but you just saw the repo man take his car away.

What do financial bricks, and plodding like a tortoise, look like?

• Having a budget, and using it to make sure you are living on less than you make.

• Hard honest work at whatever your job is, no matter how much it pays. (Because 1/3 of all millionaires NEVER made more than $100,000 in any given year.)

• An emergency fund that will see you through at least 3 to 6 months of a job loss.

• Living without debt, except for perhaps a home mortgage taken with a large down payment, after all other debt is gone.

• Steady consistent investing in your company 401(K) and/or your Roth IRA, month after month, year after year, through up markets and down markets, without panicking and jumping off when it feels like you’re on a roller coaster.

• Perhaps saving up to buy rental real estate property that is local to you, with CASH.

• Having all the right kinds of insurance (and none of the gimmicky ones).

If you're interested in building your own financial brick house, and want some help with that, please schedule a complimentary consultation here, and let's get you started.