Quote
“A part of all you earn is yours to keep.”
— George S. Clason, in The Richest Man in Babylon (1926) · The Richest Man in Babylon →
Why it was said
In George Clason's The Richest Man in Babylon, the moneylender Algamish gives this rule to the young scribe Arkad. Arkad follows it, becomes the richest man in the city, and later builds his seven cures for a lean purse on it. The book is a set of parables written in the 1920s and still in print because the rule has not changed.
What it actually means
Everything you earn is spoken for before it arrives, by rent, by bills, by the people who sell things; the sentence claims a share for the earner before any of them. Algamish's number is a tenth at least, taken first, and the rest is arranged around what remains. It is the oldest form of pay-yourself-first, and the first practical step in BookYol's Master Your Money Yol is this one, made into a bank transfer on payday.
How to use it
- 1Move a tenth of your income to a separate account on the day it arrives, before anything else is paid.
- 2Arrange the rest of the month around the nine-tenths and let the tenth become invisible.