📘 Old Book, Timeless Lessons: What Babylon Taught Me About Money

Happy Monday! I hope you are all safe and dry from the past typhoons. From someone living in Cebu, I know It’s been a rough week for all of us. 

Without further ado, let’s talk about this week’s topic. 

I first read The Richest Man in Babylon during the pandemic when I was in third year college. It was one of those books that found me at the right time— a broke college kid whose future felt foggy, and I was trying to make sense of how adults actually build wealth. It’s short, written like a collection of parables set in ancient Babylon, but what struck me was how practical it felt. 

That’s why I wanted to revisit it now. The lessons are old, but they still apply to us. 

In today’s edition, we’ll go over:

• 4 timeless from the book, The Richest Man in Babylon by George S. Clason

TLDR;

The Bottom Line

• The Richest Man in Babylon is a timeless book about how ordinary people can build wealth through discipline.

• The four lessons that still hold up today: pay yourself first, make your money work, protect it from loss, and keep improving your ability to earn.

• The message is simple but not easy. Wealth is about small, consistent choices done long enough to matter.
  

The content

1. Start Thy Purse to Fattening

This is the first and most famous lesson: save at least ten percent of everything you earn. It’s simple to the point of cliché, but the truth is most people still don’t do it.

What I love about how Clason writes it is that it’s not framed as self-denial. You’re not supposed to deprive yourself. You’re supposed to pay yourself first. That shift in mindset makes the difference. 

When I first tried this, I realized how automatic my spending was. Money came in, money went out. Saving ten percent made me more aware—not just of how much I was earning, but how quickly I let go of it. That awareness alone changed how I treated money.

2. Make Thy Gold Multiply

This is where Clason introduces the idea of making your money work for you. It’s the foundation of investing. If your coins are idle, he says, they earn you nothing. But if you lend or invest them wisely, they begin to “work” and create more coins.

In modern terms, it’s compounding. In a world where everyone wants instant results, this book reminds you that wealth grows quietly, over time, while you keep showing up to earn and save consistently.

3. Guard Thy Treasures from Loss

Clason warns against chasing quick gains or putting money into things you don’t understand. In ancient Babylon, that meant bad business deals. For us, it’s those social media “get-rich-quick” schemes or even crypto you don’t fully understand. With AI vamping up investment and financial scams, this lesson feels more pressing at this point in time.

Trust isn’t a strategy. Understanding is. That’s what Clason meant when he said wisdom protects wealth better than luck.

4. Increase Thy Ability to Earn

This one is my favorite. It’s the most underrated principle in the book. While everyone else focuses on saving and investing, Clason reminds you that your biggest wealth-building tool is yourself.

You can only save so much from a small income. So instead of obsessing over cutting expenses, start thinking about how to earn more. Learn a skill, improve your craft, look for better opportunities.

This doesn’t automatically mean hustle culture. The book frames it as building your “earning ability” because no matter how much you lose, the skills you develop stay with you. That’s the real safety net.

Final Thoughts

The Richest Man in Babylon is often dismissed as “too simple.” And maybe it is. But that’s what makes it powerful. It just tells you the truth: earn more, save a part of what you earn, make it grow, and don’t lose it to greed.

This book reminds you that money doesn’t reward brilliance. It rewards discipline. And that wealth isn’t reserved for the extraordinary. It’s available to anyone who can be consistent long enough to build it.

Stuff Worth Sharing

The Link Lowdown

• The Richest Man in Babylon by George S. Clason [Audiobook] - self-explanatory.