PAY YOURSELF FIRST

“We are living in an automatic economy. That economy today is making you automatically rich because you use the technology and the tools to build wealth automatically, or it is making you automatically poor because you have signed up and given people access to your income where you're paying everybody else automatically. So the key is the way your money flows. It has to flow to you first.”

“And I go, David, we just did everything you talked about in your class, except we didn't do that budgeting thing. That thing where you talked about budget, we didn't do that because we tried to budget the first year of our marriage and we almost got divorced over it. So we put everything on autopilot, like you talked about, but we automated everything.”

“The reality of life is this. Nobody's coming to save you financially. You are going to have to save yourself financially, and it's going to get worse, not better. What I thought was if I made more money, then I'd start saving. But when I made $50,000 a year at a college, I was still broke. And then when I made over $100,000 a year, somehow I was still broke.”

“I would find myself telling people over and over again, the one thing you need to do is make it automatic. What does that mean? It means you have to automate your entire financial life. And I would go through what that meant. And I would say, you have to pay yourself first. What does that mean? And I would explain it.”

“I sat down at a dining room table in my house, and opened my journal, and said, today is the day you're changing your life. And I wrote to myself a letter, like, David, we're done looking rich and not being rich. No more big hat, no cattle. This is, when we go back to the office tomorrow, we're changing everything.”