One Hundred Years Old and Still the Best Money Book You Can Read in an Afternoon
The Richest Man in Babylon turns one hundred this year. George S. Clason wrote it in 1926, when the radio was new and the stock market crash was still three years off, and it has been in print ever since. Not because it is clever, but because it is true in a way that doesn't wear out. A century of money books have come and gone since, most of them longer and most of them worse.
Every project has an origin, and this one is that paperback, thin enough to read in an afternoon. It is the book that turned "I should probably save something" into a habit for us, and it is the first thing we would hand to anyone getting their first real paycheck. That this portfolio started in the book's hundredth year was not planned. It is a nice coincidence, and we will take it.
What it is
Clason was a Denver businessman who wrote short pamphlets about thrift for banks to hand out to customers. The pamphlets were parables set in ancient Babylon, and they were popular enough to be collected into a book. That is the whole thing: a dozen or so stories about chariot builders, scribes, merchants and money lenders, each one teaching a single rule about money.
The main character is Arkad, the richest man in the city, who is asked by his old friends how he got that way when they all started with nothing. His answer is the heart of the book, and it fits in one line:
A part of all you earn is yours to keep.
Not what's left over at the end of the month. A part, taken first, every time, before the rent and the food and the sandals. Arkad's number is a tenth. The point is not the exact fraction. The point is that money you keep before you spend is the only money you will ever keep.
From there the book lays out what Arkad calls the Seven Cures for a Lean Purse: start your purse fattening, control your spending, make your gold multiply, guard it from loss, make your home a profitable investment, insure a future income, and increase your ability to earn. Later chapters add the Five Laws of Gold, the story of a man who worked his way out of debt by paying creditors a fixed share of his income, and a tale about the walls of Babylon that is really about why you buy insurance.
What it gets right
Pay yourself first. Every serious piece of personal-finance advice written since 1926 contains this idea, and most of them are longer and worse. If you take one thing from the book, take this. Set up the transfer so it happens before you can think about it. Our version is $100 every Monday, moved automatically, before anything else gets a vote.
Make the money work. Arkad's third cure is that gold must multiply, "to breed as the flocks in the field." Savings sitting in a jar are safe and useless. Savings that own a piece of a business earn a share of what that business earns. That is the whole idea behind a dividend: you are paid for owning, and if you reinvest what you are paid, the flock grows on its own. The income line on our front page is this cure, measured weekly.
Take advice only from people who know. The book's most painful story is about a brickmaker who hands his savings to a friend who is going to buy jewels from the Phoenicians, and loses everything because the friend knew bricks, not jewels. Clason's rule is to seek counsel from those experienced in the thing itself. We would add: and watch what they do with their own money, not what they say. It is why this site shows a real account instead of giving tips.
Patience is the whole strategy. Nothing in the book happens fast. Arkad is rich because he kept a tenth for decades, not because he found the right jewel. A new graduate has the one thing Arkad had and the rest of us are running out of, which is years.
A hundred years without an update
It reads like 1926. The voice is deliberately old-fashioned, closer to a parable than a how-to, and the setting is a world of gold coins, camels, and merchants with nothing in common with a brokerage app. It also predates nearly every tool we use today: there are no index funds in it, no retirement accounts, and no mention of taxes.
Here is the remarkable part. The camels are a hundred years old and the advice underneath them has not needed a single correction. Pay yourself first, make the money work, guard it, take counsel from people who know, be patient. Nothing published about money this year will be able to say that in 2126. Strip the camels away and the Seven Cures are still the right seven things, in the right order.
Why it fits what we do
Clason's tenth is a rule, applied every time, no judgment required. Our $100 a week is the same kind of rule. The five-box test we run on every stock is a rule. The reason rules matter is that a decision you have to make fresh every week is a decision you will eventually skip. Arkad's genius was removing himself from the decision.
The book also never promises anything quick. It is quietly honest that the first years feel like nothing. Our first dividend was 43 cents. The twentieth week of this portfolio pays about $65 a year. The book would call that a purse beginning to fatten, and it would be right.
Who should read it
If you have just started a job and have a little money left after rent for the first time in your life, read it this weekend. It takes two hours. Then set up one automatic transfer, of any amount, to a brokerage account that holds nothing else. You will have done the thing the whole book is about before the week is out.
If you have been investing for years, read it anyway. It is a reset button for the part of your brain that has started to believe money is complicated.
Where to get it
The book was published in 1926, which means the original text is in the public domain in the United States, and free scans are easy to find, including at the Internet Archive. If you want a copy you can hold, mark up, and hand to someone, the paperback costs about the price of a lunch:
The Richest Man in Babylon on Amazon
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Nothing here is financial advice. We own the stocks we write about, we read the books we recommend, and we tell you which is which.