The key ideas

The Way to Wealth

Benjamin Franklin, 1758

Why do you earn a decent living and still never have any money, while it feels like prices or your boss are to blame? Franklin's answer offers no comfort. Most often, the problem isn't your income. It's the time slipping away, the small expenses you don't notice, and the debts that quietly steal your freedom. A short set of iron rules about work and thrift that still hold true three centuries later.

Who it is for

Anyone who wants simple, iron rules about money, work, and thrift

Small expenses go unnoticed, but they're usually exactly how a fortune slips away.

What the book is about

This is a tiny but very dense book about how an ordinary person can climb out of a permanent shortage of money. It addresses a pain familiar to almost everyone: you work, you earn a decent amount, and yet there's still no money, and taxes, prices, or the boss seem to be at fault. The author calmly pushes back: most of the time, we ourselves are the main source of our own poverty, because we waste time, buy things we don't need, and slide into debt. He gathers simple rules of work and thrift that require no talent and no luck — just attention to your own habits.

Benjamin Franklin was one of America's founding fathers, but also a printer, an inventor, and a very practical businessman who climbed out of poverty himself. For years he handed out his thoughts as short sayings in an almanac, and then gathered them into a single speech: as if a wise old man at the market were answering a crowd complaining about hard times. What came out of it is a timeless conversation about money, equally useful to an eighteenth-century apprentice and to someone today with a paycheck and a credit card.

Idea 1. Time is money

A person's main capital isn't their wallet but their time, because both income and life itself are built from hours. Lost money can be earned back, but a lost day never returns, and in that sense time is worth more than gold. When you burn an hour for nothing, you're not just “resting” — you're throwing away something you could have traded for money, a skill, or genuinely needed rest. So the first step toward prosperity is to start noticing where your hours leak away, just as carefully as you count your coins.

Every evening Max opens his feed “for five minutes” and gets stuck scrolling for two hours. That's sixty hours a month — nearly four full workdays. His coworker Igor spent those same evenings on an online spreadsheets course and got a raise six months later. Both worked equally hard, but Igor understood that his evening time was also an asset, and traded it for higher income.

Count your time as strictly as your money: an hour wasted is income you didn't earn.

Read in Livria

About the author

Benjamin Franklin was one of America's founding fathers; here he gathers folk wisdom about money and work into a short piece of advice.

All books by this author: Benjamin Franklin

Terms from the book

  • Procrastination
  • Thrift: The ability not to overspend and to keep back part of what you earn, instead of blowing through all of it.
  • Debt: Someone else's money that you're obligated to repay, usually with interest; until you pay it back, you're dependent on the lender.

All terms

Similar books