12 Rules on Personal Finance

Answer by James Altucher, author and blogger, on Quora.

1. Don’t get a salary. A salary will never make you money.

2. Don’t invest any of your money. Investing is for wealth preservation, not wealth creation, so first you have to make wealth.

3. Come up with ten ideas a day. This doesn’t seem like “personal finance” but it is.

4. Don’t try to save money by not buying expensive coffee or taking subways instead of cabs. That’s a myth. The best way to save money is to make more.

5. Learn how to copywrite.

6. Come up with ten ideas for how two people can help each other. Introduce them and stay out of the way. This is real networking. Not fake networking where people hand business cards to strangers.

7. When you have wealth, never invest more than 2% of your wealth in any one idea.

8. Don’t enter a business with a lot of competition. Enter a business with a monopoly. This means high profits, high perks, great education.

9. Read a lot about things that have nothing to do with finance. Then combine them.

10. Sleeping eight hours a day might be the most important personal finance rule.

11. Be around people who love you and who you love. Eliminate people who bring you down.

12. Gratitude = Abundance. You can only be grateful for what is abundant in your life or what will be abundant in your life. So practice gratitude / abundance all day long.

Trust your body. With everything you do, everyone you meet, ask, “is this good for me?” Your unconscious brain will tell you yes or no. Wait for it to answer.

Once it answers, follow the advice.

Look everywhere for what is hidden. The people who know personal finance hide the money very carefully.

The people who don’t know personal finance have TV shows about it.

Be skeptical. Even of me.

This question originally appeared on Quora: What are the ten most important things about personal finance someone without a finance background must know?

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