The book · 95 pages
What is inside the book
Here is the whole contents page. Every part, every module, and one line on what each module does. Read it and decide before you spend anything.
Most of it is about how much you have to invest, not where to put it. That is the part almost nobody works on, and it is the part that moved my own timeline the furthest.
The five levers
There are only five things you can do with money you earn. The book ranks them for your situation, in euros, and then works on the one worth the most.
- 1Earning powerWhat your career could pay, and what your skills are worth on the open market.
- 2CompensationWhether you are paid what the market pays for the job you already do.
- 3Tax and structureWhat you cost your employer, what reaches you, and the legal ways to keep more of it.
- 4Investment yieldWhat your money earns once it is invested.
- 5ExpensesCutting what you spend. The one almost everybody starts with.
Almost everybody starts at number five and stays there. Cutting spending has a floor, and the floor is your rent. The first three have no ceiling that most people have ever found, so that is where the book spends its time.
Take your income from €50,000 to €65,000 and you have €15,000 more to invest, every year, without changing anything else.
I do not teach investing, and I do not need to
For your first decade it is the least important part. How much you put in matters far more than what you put it in. Somebody investing €500 a month perfectly is beaten by somebody investing €2,000 a month into something ordinary, and it is not close.
It is in the book anyway, because it stops being the least important part. Give it long enough and the money earns more in a year than you do, and by then you need to understand what you own. So Module 8 is principles. What every asset is really pricing, why boring wins, and a one-page investment rule you write while you are calm instead of during a bad month. It is not a fund list and it never will be.
Part I · The math nobody showed you
Module 1
Know your number
Where your money is today. The real figure, not a guess.
Module 2
Find your biggest lever
Five things move your money. Most people pick the smallest one.
Part II · The most powerful asset
Module 3
Build your earning engine
You earn more than your savings do. That engine has a ceiling you have never measured.
Module 4
Build your €10k raise plan
I got a raise and felt great about it. Six months later I saw the trap.
Module 5
Get paid for your value
The same conversation, once a year, five years running. My take-home went from €2,000 to €12,500.
Part III · Keep what you already earn
Module 6
Keep more of it
I did not work one extra hour. I changed one piece of paper.
Module 7
Build the money machine
The money moves on payday, before you can spend it. You still keep a slice for fun.
Part IV · Put it somewhere boring
Module 8
Invest without becoming a nerd
You do not need to beat the market. Boring is the whole point.
Part V · What it is all for
Module 9
Define your Freedom Life
Stop chasing a big number. Work out the monthly income you actually need.
Module 10
Build the ten-year plan
Ten modules become one page. One number, one date, one next action.
And at the back
The rules
The whole book squeezed into a short list. Lose everything else and these still get you most of the way.
Eleven prompts
One builds your profile. The other ten do the work: your baseline, your lever, the ceiling test, your 90-day plan, your compensation case, your gap, your wealth machine, your investment policy, your ladder and your ten-year plan.
Is this just earn more, save more, invest more?
That part is not new and I will not pretend it is. The part that is not obvious is Module 6. For nine years I took a €5,000 net salary and never asked what my employer actually spent to pay me. It was €8,501.29. Fixing that took one conversation and no extra hours, and it took four years off my timeline on its own. The arithmetic is on the proof page and you can reproduce it in a government calculator.