The Rules of Wealth by Richard Templar — Book Notes

TL;DR

• Templar packs roughly 100 short «rules» about the psychology of getting rich: spend less than you earn, treat money as neutral, pay yourself first, let money work.
• The behavioural core is sound and boring: your savings rate beats your stock picks, and habits beat income for building net worth.
• The framing is the problem. Aphorisms carry no evidence, «wealth is a state of mind» over-claims, and structural factors (wages, luck, starting capital) barely appear.
• Everything useful here is better sourced elsewhere, and we hand you those sources below.
• Verdict: read our notes instead.

Verdict

«The Rules of Wealth» is a pleasant, fast read that recycles a handful of durable truths and dresses them as personal wisdom. The good rules are genuinely good. They are also not Templar’s, and they land harder with a study attached than with a pep talk.

The book’s weakness is structural: about 100 confident one-liners, almost none carrying a citation, several tuned to mid-2000s Britain. When the advice is right, we can point you to the research it echoes. When it drifts into «prosperity consciousness», it quietly ignores wages, luck, and where you started. Our rating: «Read our notes instead», and the rest of our book notes apply the same test.

The big idea

Templar’s thesis is that wealth is a set of behaviours and beliefs, not an accident of birth or a stroke of luck. Rich people, he argues, think about money differently, and the gap is closeable by anyone willing to change habits.

There is a real insight buried here. Money is a tool, and your relationship with it is learned. But the book stretches «mindset matters» into «mindset is decisive», which is where the evidence stops following it.

Key ideas

• Spend less than you earn. The whole book reduces to this. A positive gap between income and outflow, invested steadily, is the only mechanism that reliably compounds. Everything else is commentary.
• Money is neutral. Templar treats cash as morally blank, neither salvation nor sin. This is healthier than the guilt many carry, and it lowers the emotional friction that makes people avoid their own accounts.
• Pay yourself first. Save before you spend, not with whatever survives the month. Automating the transfer removes the daily decision, which is exactly where most saving plans die.
• Kill consumer debt, keep useful leverage. He separates a mortgage or a business loan from credit-card balances. The distinction is the difference between debt that builds an asset and debt that funds a lifestyle.
• Build more than one income stream. The wealthy rarely lean on a single salary. Templar pushes side income and ownership, though he underestimates how much capital and time a second stream demands.
• Let money work. Invested money earns; idle money erodes. Compound growth is the quiet engine, and time in the market matters more than cleverness in it.
• Avoid get-rich-quick schemes. No legitimate shortcut exists, and the schemes mostly enrich their sellers. This is his soundest chapter, and it ages well.

What holds up

Pay yourself first, automated. This is the book’s best rule, and behavioural economics backs it. In Thaler and Benartzi’s «Save More Tomorrow» programme, workers who pre-committed to automatic escalation lifted their savings rate from 3.5 to 13.6 percent over about 40 months, and 80 percent stayed enrolled through four pay raises (Journal of Political Economy, 2004). Templar tells you to save first; the research tells you why automation, not willpower, is what makes it stick (Science, 2013).

Behaviour beats income. Templar insists ordinary earners can build wealth. Stanley and Danko’s «The Millionaire Next Door» found exactly that: high-income doctors and lawyers were roughly twice as likely to be under-accumulators of wealth, while quiet savers in modest neighbourhoods cleared the bar (Stanley and Danko, 1996). The salary is the raw material; the habit is the machine.

The savings rate does the heavy lifting. Templar’s «spend less than you earn» is quietly the most important line in personal finance. The gap between what you earn and what you spend, not your fund selection, sets how fast you reach independence, a point the FIRE community popularised in «The Shockingly Simple Math Behind Early Retirement» (Mr Money Mustache, 2012). A saver on 50 percent gets there in a fraction of the time of one on 10 percent, regardless of returns.

Lifestyle creep is real. His warning against spending every raise matches the hedonic-adaptation literature: people drift back toward a baseline of satisfaction as new comforts become normal (Diener, Lucas and Scollon, American Psychologist, 2006). Raise your spending with every raise and the wealth gap never opens, which is why learning to want less rather than earn more compounds in your favour.

What doesn’t

The aphorism format has no evidence. About 100 rules arrive as assertion. That works for tone and fails as proof. When Templar and the data agree, fine; when a rule is merely his hunch, nothing tells you which is which. A verdict you cannot check is not knowledge, it is atmosphere.

«Wealth is a state of mind» over-claims. Mindset lowers friction and sustains habits, and that is worth having. It does not create capital. Framing prosperity as mainly psychological quietly blames the reader for outcomes that turn on wages, health, and timing.

Survivorship and structure go missing. The book studies people who got rich and reverse-engineers their traits, without the equal-effort people who did not. National saving is shaped by income too: the US personal saving rate swings with the economy, not just with attitude (US Bureau of Economic Analysis, via FRED). Advice that ignores the starting line misreads why some finish first.

Some rules are dated and local. Mid-2000s British property optimism runs through the text, and the housing chapters read differently after a decade of price shocks. Specifics age faster than principles, and Templar mixes the two.

The same flaw as «Rich Dad». Like Kiyosaki, Templar sells mindset over mechanics, and the mechanics are where beginners actually get stuck. We took that book apart in our skeptical reread of Rich Dad Poor Dad, and the pattern repeats: inspiring frame, thin operating manual.

Why the tools outlive the theory

Strip the philosophy and three tools remain, each working for a concrete reason. Automating your saving works because it removes the monthly decision, and decisions are where good intentions leak. Killing consumer debt works because a 20 percent interest rate is a guaranteed negative return no market beats. Letting money compound works because time, not timing, is the variable you control.

None of this requires believing in «prosperity consciousness». It requires one transfer, one payoff schedule, and patience. Our notes on Secrets of the Millionaire Mind trace the same mindset genre and reach the same split: the habits survive, the metaphysics does not.

Who should actually read it

Read Templar if you want a gentle, readable nudge and you respond to short, punchy rules more than to charts. As a mood-setter for someone who has never thought about money on purpose, it does a real job.

Skip it if you already save automatically and want mechanics: allocation, tax-advantaged accounts, and rate math. It will not teach you those. Also skip it if aphorisms without sources annoy you, because that is the entire book. For the underlying discipline, our money guides and Templar’s own Rules of Life cover the behaviour with less over-claiming.

One thing to try

The shift: stop treating saving as the leftover at month-end and make it the first bill you pay. This is the one behaviour with the strongest evidence behind it, and it survives every recession the aphorisms cannot predict.

First move: today, set up an automatic transfer of a fixed sum to a separate account on payday, before anything else moves. Start small enough that you will not cancel it, then raise it with your next pay increase, not before.

Get the book

Find «The Rules of Wealth» on Amazon — as an Amazon Associate, The Boring Work earns from qualifying purchases (disclosure).

The boring bottom line

Templar is right about the boring things and vague about the hard ones. Spend less than you earn, automate the gap, and let time compound it. That sentence carries most of the book’s value, and it needs no faith in mindset to work. If you want the evidence rather than the encouragement, the sources below are the actual product.

Sources

• Thaler, R. and Benartzi, S. (2004). Save More Tomorrow: Using Behavioral Economics to Increase Employee Saving. Journal of Political Economy (UCLA Anderson).
• Benartzi, S. and Thaler, R. (2013). Behavioral Economics and the Retirement Savings Crisis. Science.
• Stanley, T. and Danko, W. (1996). The Millionaire Next Door. Longstreet Press (overview).
• Diener, E., Lucas, R. and Scollon, C. (2006). Beyond the Hedonic Treadmill: Revising the Adaptation Theory of Well-Being. American Psychologist.
• US Bureau of Economic Analysis. Personal Saving Rate (PSAVERT). Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis (FRED).
• Adeney, P. (2012). The Shockingly Simple Math Behind Early Retirement. Mr Money Mustache.
• Templar, R. (2015, expanded ed.). The Rules of Wealth. Pearson / FT Press.

The Russian-language predecessor of this article (2009) is preserved in the archive.