The Wealthy Barber Crib Notes Chapter 1

For those with perhaps a passing interest in finances (pun intended), you may have heard of the book The Wealthy Barber by David Chilton. It's not quite a Finances-For-Dummies book but it became quite popular for bringing the highly complicated world of Finances (anyone seen The Big Short?) down to the Every-man level.

It's nothing ground-breaking in the literary world. In fact, it reminds me of a lot of similar self-help books that frame their lessons in the third person. The reader is simply an eavesdropper on a conversation based in a barbershop which conveniently avoids any other intrusions into these lessons. There are some bad jokes, stilted attempts at character development but again, it wasn't meant to entertain but inform.

It was written in 1989, back before the Internet, The Clintons and all that Y2K nonsense. However, the advice probably still applies today.

I say probably because I haven't finished reading it. I am on Chapter Three. But seeing as how I am morphing this blog from a mortgage-based to a financial-based, I am going to condense the chapters for you in The Wealthy Barber to simple one sentence summaries.

Chapter 1 Summary - Save 10% of your earnings.

That's it. I'm not going to get into how to save 10% other than to say you should have a savings account that you don't access for funds and then put 10% of your paychecks into it.

But what actually is 10%? someone might ask.

Take that net pay amount on your check and move the decimal point over one. If you made $100.00, 10% is $10. If you made $1354.00, put aside $135.40. You can also google 'what is 10% of 687.99?' and you will get an answer.

Technology can be great.

You can finally use that watch your grandma gave you
for your 10th birthday!

Anyways, that's lesson one. And like the Wealthy Barber says to his interested parties; come back next week and I will tell you lesson two.