THE RICHEST MAN IN BABYLON TAKE AWAYS {4/40}

By The stash — 11 Aug 2026

Entry 004.i

Pay Yourself First

The first lesson communicated by Arkad is to pay yourself first. This pairs well with the lesson "for each ten coins you spend but nine." As an expansion, paying tithes to the church should also be accounted for. The lesson describes a saving strategy, a discipline, which allows you to start utilising less of your income and divert the excess to set yourself up for your future.

In this chapter, Arkad describes a life all too familiar to many people, you go to work for a month, and after a long month of "toil," you get paid and have to pay everyone else, retaining nothing for yourself. He explains that with this scenario, once you have something small left for yourself, you'll opt to use it for other things due to the workload, like enjoyment.

It's important to understand this lesson isn't about restricting how you enjoy your money, it's about only using what's necessary and has been accounted for. The current flow of money goes from employer to yourself to merchants (obligations). Looking at it through another lens, you work to pay the merchants. Arkad advises using 90 percent (or 80, with tithes) of your income, explaining that even though it's not everything you were paid, you'll still be able to do everything you did with 100 percent.

.rootx1*

There is a principle called Parkinson's Law, a task will expand to fill the time you allocate to it. If a project should take 5 months, you'll take 5 months to complete it. But if you say this same project should take 1 month, it will take 1 month to complete. Likewise, I believe spending works in a similar way, the amount of income you allocate for utilisation will determine your spending. If you allocate 80 percent to be utilised, your spending will fit that constraint and the things you don't actually need get weeded out, freeing up funds that were hidden in plain sight.