My first mentor is an East Asian woman who taught me this habit: Set up specific bank accounts for specific purposes so that you know exactly what’s happening in your bank accounts (clarity and certainty = financial abundance).
Practical East Asian women are the best wives because they help their husbands make money and save money.
There is an effective system which can help you to manage your finances very well and this system is used by many rich East Asians that I know. Every one of my rich Chinese friends has more than one bank account because every bank account has a specific purpose.
For example, my rich East Asian wife not only has a regular money time every fortnight, but also has a crystal-clear system for her finances. In fact, she has six bank accounts –
Bank Account 1: Income
Bank Account 2: Savings
Bank Account 3: Investment
Bank Account 4: Personal development
Bank Account 5: Play
Bank Account 6: Bills
This looks slightly crazy – who needs so many bank accounts? But this East Asian lady explains that she has used this system for many years and it has helped her tremendously.
Here’s this East Asian beauty’s explanation:
- Whenever she gets paid, that money goes to her first bank account (Income account). Now she starts to manage her money from here.
- After getting paid, she calculates how much money she can save during her fortnightly money time and transfers money to her savings account. Please note that she doesn’t follow Tony Robbin’s rules such as “save 10% of your income” because East Asian women are very flexible – they know how to apply theories in the right ways. Rules don’t matter; principles are paramount. Therefore, she sometimes saves 80% of her income and sometimes saves 5% of her income. It all depends on the situation of that particular period of time. Remember: a Greek philosopher Heraclitus famously said, “Change is the only constant in life.” Having said that, she usually saves at least 50% of her income. By the way, the reason she transfers money to her savings bank account first is because she always pays herself first and pays her bills last – she is more important than her bills.
- This East Asian stunner understands investing and has hired a reliable financial planner to help her in this regard as well. So, she follows her financial planners’ advice and invests her money through her investment bank account regularly. That’s her third bank account.
- As to her fourth bank account, she values personal development, so it’s called “personal development account”. That being said, she isn’t a self-help junkie who goes to every seminar and buys every book just to consume information. Instead, her personal development activities are extremely down-to-earth. She saves money in this bank account in order to spend money on things and activities which actually improve her life. For instance, she uses money in her fourth bank account to buy self-help books. But she isn’t one of those Internet gurus who tells you that they listen to audio books at 3x speed and consume a lot of content every day or read a book per day. She knows that learning isn’t about consumption; it’s about truly understanding new ideas and implementing those ideas in order to benefit her life. When she is reading a book, sometimes she reads a page and then stops to think for an hour (e.g. she goes to Wikipedia and learns certain terms that she needs to know so that she can fully understand what the author is talking about in the book). And then she sometimes reads another page and stops to think for an hour (e.g. she is thinking about how to implement these new ideas from the book in her life).
Yes, it’s not about the knowledge; it’s all about the application. Knowledge is everywhere, but the implementation of knowledge is rare. (Hopefully you will implement what you’ve learned from this book!) That’s why some books take she several months to finish reading, whereas some other books only took her a few hours to read – it all depends on the nature of the book – She judges each book differently. “I’ll never finish reading certain books because I always need to refer to these books and read them again,” says this East Asian beauty, “But as to some other books, I just let them sit on my coffee table for years because they are not very important.” Similarly, whenever she attends a personal development seminar, she takes notes and writes down how to implement those new ideas in her notebook as well. More importantly, the day after the seminar, she takes out her notes and reviews each new idea that she has learned, and then actually implements those fantastic ideas in her life immediately. Apart from that, her personal development activities are beyond reading books and attending seminars. As a matter of fact, she believes that joining networking organizations is also personal development because her professional life and her personal life aren’t separated – she does what she loves to make a living, so she doesn’t have two different personas. “When someone has two different personas, that’s an energy leak,” says this beauty from East Asia, “I never want to present myself differently in my career and in my personal life, because I make a living by being who I really am.” - Her fifth bank account is called “play account”, meaning she uses money in this bank account to enjoy life and have fun. Many people feel guilty whenever they buy something expensive, but this woman from East Asia never feels that way because she knows exactly what she is doing. After she has looked after her savings account, investment account and personal development account, she transfers a percentage of her income to her play account. In fact, she argues that play is very important to her, which surprised me a little bit because I thought in order to get rich, an individual must work 10 times harder than everyone else. Yet she points out that enjoying life is of vital importance because that reduces her anxiety. This intelligent East Asian lady even showed me a book called Play It Away: A Workaholic’s Cure for Anxiety, a book written by Charlie Hoehn who used to be Tim Ferriss’ full-time employee. (By the way, Tim Ferriss speaks Chinese, too.) According to this woman from East Asia, her play includes: 1) going to her weekly salsa dance class; 2) going to see hilarious performance shows such as Puppetry of the Penis; 3) having a massage and a facial once a week at a local spa. Indeed, she knows how to look after her body & mind and play her anxiety away. Better still, she spends money on those activities guilt-free.
- Lastly, her sixth bank account is for her bills, including tax, strata fees, council rates, electricity bills, water bills, cell phone and internet bills, insurance premium, accounting software subscription and websites’ maintenance (domain name and hosting fees).
When I asked this East Asian woman about her money for grocery, this is what she said to me, “Every fortnight, I withdraw $400 cash from my income bank account and I only pay cash when I go shopping for grocery and other stuff that I need.” She states that because basically she only allows herself to use $400 cash for shopping every fortnight, she almost never overspends. Moreover, she doesn’t have a credit card because she doesn’t need it. In her opinion, credit cards encourage people to overspend & most people who use credit cards don’t have good money habits.
I also asked her some questions about how exactly she spends her $400 every fortnight, and here’s her answer: “I don’t have a fixed budget for everything because I don’t believe in rigid rules. Instead, I believe in principles. Previously, whenever I wanted to buy something, I always asked myself, ‘Do I want it? Or do I need it?’ If I wanted it, I wouldn’t buy it. But if I needed it, I would buy it. That was how I operate in the past. I have to say that was a pretty good strategy in terms of how to manage someone’s shopping habits. However, recently, I’ve slightly changed my strategy in this regard. Now I actually buy certain things that I really, really want because I have realized that if I truly want something, I will definitely use it after I’ve bought it. So, that amount of money isn’t wasted at all. As I see it, money enjoyed isn’t money wasted. Having said that, most of the time, I have a budget for things that I really want. For example, every fashion item that I buy has to be under $100. If a T-shirt costs more than $100, I won’t buy it no matter how much I want it. Fashion isn’t my Money Dial, meaning it’s not something that I value.”
East Asian women are so practical that they are considered the best wives.
