9 Money Rules of the Top 1%

Does thinking about your personal finances make your palms start to sweat? If so, you’re not alone. The sheer amount of information out there about managing your finances is overwhelming, especially for people in their 20s or 30s who are just starting their financial journeys. Ramit Sethi is a self-taught expert in personal finance whose goal is to help you cut through the noise of conflicting and overly technical financial advice, get past your own hang-ups around money, and take small steps toward a “rich life”—whatever that looks like for you.

In this summary, you’ll learn how to use credit cards wisely, choose the right bank accounts and investment accounts, plan out your spending, and ultimately create a financial system that grows your money automatically.

A massive bestseller now in its 13th edition, Burton Malkiel’s A Random Walk Down Wall Street provides a comprehensive and entertaining introduction to the world of finance. Malkiel leverages his experience as an academic economist and former Wall Street portfolio manager to explain for the lay reader the intricacies of security analysis, asset valuation, and investment theory. He also offers a wealth of practical investment principles that will be useful for novice and seasoned investors alike.

Most of us assume financial success depends on education and intelligence. But in The Psychology of Money, finance expert Morgan Housel presents an alternate hypothesis: The key to financial success lies in understanding human behavior. Housel posits that when you understand how emotions and beliefs influence your financial decisions, you’ll make better financial decisions.

In this guide, we compare Housel’s advice with that of other finance experts and supplement his ideas with concrete recommendations. You’ll learn why people fail to achieve financial success and what’s behind your desire for money. You’ll also learn what to include in a financial strategy, how to create one you can follow for decades, how to follow it through those decades—and how to pay attention to the information you need to do so.

In Money: Master the Game, motivational speaker and life coach Tony Robbins argues that anyone can master money, achieve financial well-being, and create their dream lifestyle. In Robbins’ view, to master money means building an investing strategy that yields passive income for life and gives you the choice of when, where, and whether to continue working. Conversely, neglecting to master money means that you’ll always need to trade your time for money.

Our guide unpacks Robbins’s approach to changing your money mindset and financial strategy, and we contrast it with popular approaches to financial independence such as Financial Independence Retire Early (FIRE) and Early Retirement Extreme (ERE).

There isn’t enough time in the day to meet all of the work and personal responsibilities you’re swamped with, let alone keep up with email, social media, and all the things you’ve been meaning to read. In Eat That Frog, business consultant Brian Tracy says the answer is to identify your most important task—the one with the greatest consequences—and do that first each day. It’s like eating a frog: when you have a big challenge, or frog to eat, it’s best to get it out of the way first; everything after that will be easier by comparison. Based on this insight, Tracy offers a list of practical tips for improved productivity and success.

In Secrets of the Millionaire Mind, self-made millionaire T. Harv Eker reveals the difference between the way rich people and poor people think and feel about money. Eker argues that these thoughts and beliefs impel you to take actions that either move you toward financial success or away from it—if you’re not happy with the state of your finances, it’s because your unproductive thoughts and beliefs about money hold you back from the financial success that you want. According to Eker, you can dramatically improve your finances by taking conscious control of your thoughts and adopting a rich attitude that will inspire you to take new actions that lead to your financial success.

In this guide, we’ve reorganized Eker’s ideas into three distinct parts that walk you through his philosophy and give you actionable advice on developing a richer mindset. Additionally, we include research underlying why people often fail to meet their financial goals and actionable ideas from other self-improvement authors, financial authors, and psychologists.

Rich Dad, Poor Dad is one of the best-selling financial books in history, selling over 35 million copies. The premise: when growing up, author Robert Kiyosaki had two dads advising him: 1) a Stanford-educated PhD who followed traditional career thinking and was financially illiterate (the Poor Dad, his biological father); 2) a high school dropout who built a business empire employing thousands (the Rich Dad, his best friend’s father).

The two dads are a parable for two different approaches to wealth: Poor Dad recommends getting a secure job with good benefits and retiring with a pension. Rich Dad recommends amassing assets that make money for you, becoming financially literate, and practicing independent thinking.

In this book, learn how to achieve financial independence, why it’s a terrible idea to see your home as your biggest investment, and how to overcome the biggest mental blocks to becoming wealthy.

Running a successful business requires a lot of time and effort, but it doesn’t have to take over your life. In Buy Back Your Time, veteran entrepreneur Dan Martell says you can run a profitable business and make time for the things you love without having to work yourself to the bone. Simply buy back your time: Hire others to take over some of your work, and then invest your reclaimed time in activities that replenish your energy and advance your business. Martell shares practical strategies for managing your time better, including how to identify a task’s value, waste less time at work, and create optimized schedules for achieving your personal and professional goals.

In this guide, we’ll discuss how to prioritize and delegate tasks, run your business more efficiently, and create weekly and yearly plans to optimize your time. Along the way, we’ll supplement Martell’s strategies with advice from other self-improvement experts and provide additional practical tips for taking control of your time.

Mike Michalowicz’s Profit First criticizes traditional business accounting methods by claiming that they are unintuitive, and that their unintuitive nature leads many entrepreneurs to failure. He then outlines an alternate accounting system, which he calls the Profit First method. In the Profit First method, a percentage of income is set aside as profit before any expenses are calculated. This method, he says, allows an entrepreneur to do their business accounting in a simple and intuitive way, and to increase their business’s profitability and stability.

In this guide, we’ll discuss Michalowicz’s criticisms of traditional accounting, as well as his own recommendations for how to set up Profit First accounting and use its guidelines to improve your business. We’ll also provide commentary explaining psychological and economic research related to Michalowicz’s claims, as well as practical advice on how to apply some of his broader recommendations.

Most of us assume financial success depends on education and intelligence. But in The Psychology of Money, finance expert Morgan Housel presents an alternate hypothesis: The key to financial success lies in understanding human behavior. Housel posits that when you understand how emotions and beliefs influence your financial decisions, you’ll make better financial decisions.

In this guide, we compare Housel’s advice with that of other finance experts and supplement his ideas with concrete recommendations. You’ll learn why people fail to achieve financial success and what’s behind your desire for money. You’ll also learn what to include in a financial strategy, how to create one you can follow for decades, how to follow it through those decades—and how to pay attention to the information you need to do so.