The Money Monk System

The framework used to build the Money Monk platform is guided by over 15 years of mastering everything needed to build wealth and use money well.

It is broad enough to support your big vision for your life while still being precise enough to take daily actions.

It goes beyond traditional programs by eliminating cookie-cutter advice to take a personalized approach to handling your situation.

As you get on the wealth-building path, you will learn that TIME is your most valuable asset. The longer you are on the path, the more powerful your money will become. Our system saves you time and money and accelerates your money growth. You don't have to spend months or years researching a plan - you can take mine and put it into action today.

Whether you invest in just one part of the system or the entire "stack," the return on investment you will see is better control over your money situation, the confidence to take action, a personalized plan, and a framework for staying consistent over the long term.

The Opportunity and the Problem

Reading the "Start Here" post introduced you to a new definition of money and wealth. Money is what you exchange your life's energy for when you work. We want to honor this exchange by seeing money as a tool that can empower your life—if you use it correctly.

Building wealth is one of the most purposeful and powerful ways to use money. Wealth in our system is defined by an acronym: TOOL. Wealth provides you with Time, Options, and Ownership and empowers your "Life's Vision" (TOOL). You can remember this acronym by thinking of wealth as a "tool" in your toolbox. The better we become with this tool, the more we empower our life's vision.

It is critical that you embrace this idea. By adopting these definitions, you set the course for your journey.

This is important because the "life's vision" that wealth helps empower needs to be the "why" that inspires you enough to make the effort (the "how") worth it.

This is necessary because the "how" of wealth building is challenging. Even at the "tactical" level, which is "what" you do, most people are not willing to put in the work to do it. It requires that you decide to live below your means. It requires that you save your money instead of spending it—this is what I call "tough trade-off decisions"—the trade-off of avoiding purchase gratification to build wealth. Imagine figuring out ways to save 10%, 20%, 30%, or upwards of 50-60% of your income for this purpose. It's tough!

It requires you to consistently invest your money over a long(ish) period to be successful. All of this requires you to work and earn money. It is challenging to do this when everything around you tells you to do the opposite.

Think about it: you are constantly advertised and marketed to. Everything around you, our entire culture, is dedicated to "consumerism". It teaches you from a very young age that to be valued, you must spend. A nice car, a big house, and fancy clothes are all examples of ways you prove to others that you are successful. Beyond impressing others, we learn that to be happy, we must have more. To be satisfied, we have to be increasingly comfortable - always searching for ways to spend money to find happiness.

To make matters worse, most people are financially illiterate through no fault of their own. Our education system fails people and doesn't help them understand how to use money. Most parents don't know how to use money, and they teach their kids bad habits. The culture around us encourages consumerism. The 'financial advisors' you turn to are paid rich commissions to steer you into wealth-destroying products.

The Solution

The solution is to transform your relationship with money, change your money habits, and build the skills necessary to grow wealth. It is creating a new lifestyle paired with the knowledge of how to grow money.

The great news is that anyone can do this! It can feel overwhelming initially, but if you remain committed, you can learn all the skills you need. You can influence your situation. You can build wealth. Yes, it takes sacrifice. Yes, it takes effort. But it is worth it—if you have the right "why" (your life's vision).

The Money Monk System

How it is different

Here is how the Money Monk System approaches this problem and provides a differentiated solution.

It goes beyond the "tactical" money steps that most money systems offer. You may be familiar with Dave Ramsey's debt payoff system or other systems that help you better utilize your dollars. There is nothing inherently wrong with those systems. But they often are too narrow in focus, or even if they do begin to address wealth building, they do not address the elephant in the room: the mindset, behaviors, and lifestyle changes needed to succeed over a long period.

Even worse, much of the advice is too cookie-cutter for individual situations. It leaves you wondering if it's the right next step, or they may help you solve one problem without solving for your bigger picture.

The Money Monk system takes a different approach.

I am interested in giving you as much "tactical" knowledge as you need to immediately become successful and teaching it to you in a simple way. This includes budgeting, paying off debt, investing, saving money, creating goals and objectives, creating a wealth plan, and so on.

These tactical steps can feel overwhelming when you first start, but I promise that they can be automated and learned pretty quickly—so quickly that you could start investing this week if you really want to get started.

The more significant challenge is developing a long-term, sustainable mindset around a lifestyle that creates wealth for regular people like you and me.

This is part of a 3-part focus shown below: We spend 50% of the time focused on cultivating the mindset you need to build wealth over a long period of time. You apply this mindset to your actions and financial education. As you grow this mindset, your "why" for building wealth gets stronger, helping you overcome the challenges that tempt you off the wealth-building path.

How we apply these concepts in the Money Monk system

First, everything starts with your vision. This is where we get crystal clear about what you want from a life empowered by money - not hurt by it. Your vision does not need to be perfect and unchangeable. As you grow, you will find that your vision changes over time. The point isn't to get it perfect. The point is to get it precise enough that it is inspiring to you and that you can see yourself "in it".

If you can get to the point where you believe in your vision, it will become powerful enough as a "why" that you can do the hard work of building wealth. Most people DO NOT have this. One reason people get stuck in paycheck-to-paycheck living is that they don't have a larger purpose for their money.

Below is the "Money Monk" pyramid, which I use to connect these concepts. The system focuses on four layers: your vision, your strategies, your goals, and your tactics. Together, we grow your knowledge "up and down" these layers. Then, inside each layer, we grow your capabilities.

Let's walk through each of these layers together. We just briefly tackled the top of the pyramid - your "vision". Let's go down one layer to strategies.

Strategies

After we develop your big vision—or your "why" that helps you aim towards a long-term goal—we develop strategies for accomplishing this vision. We use five strategies in the system to make this happen.

The first three strategies outline the actions you need to take in the world to be successful: earning money, saving (and spending) money, and investing it.

1. Earning: to build wealth, we need to earn money. There is art and science to growing your profession and skills to grow what you earn. We approach this intentionally.
2. Saving: it does not matter how much you earn if you spend everything you make. After earning, you must learn how to save and spend in accordance with your plan and values.
3. Investing: finally, the other two steps do not matter if you do not invest your money well and let it grow. The magic for regular people is that the compound interest of your investments can far exceed your earnings if you invest well.

The next two strategies continually influence how you approach earning, saving, and investing. Remember, we focus nearly 50% of our attention on these because if you don't have these correct, you won't succeed over the long term, even if you know what you need to do.

1. Timing and Monitoring: we build a comprehensive plan with checkpoints throughout the year to help you stay accountable and on the path.
2. Mindset and Sustainability: grow your mindset and cultivate a lifelong wealth-building mentality to apply to your actions.

Goals

Next, our goals flow out of the strategies we create. They are informed by your strategies, but the success of your goals also guides how your strategies change over time. Meaning that this is a flexible system that will continue to change and grow. Each person's goals will be different based on where they are on their path. But in general, here's what we aim at:

1. Earning: growing a sustainable career. This means you are content in your job, find some satisfaction, and can do it without burning out. Ideally, you build skills in your profession and get paid more, accelerating your wealth building.
2. Saving money is a lifelong effort. Here, we build debt reduction plans, learn to grow our savings, cut back on expenses that harm our wealth-building, and learn to spend money well.
3. Investing: Investing gets a lot of attention, but it does not need to be complex. Here, we learn how to self-manage money in a simple, easy-to-understand way.
4. Timing and Monitoring: We continually refine our plan, adding more specificity as we gain greater clarity about what our "life's vision" means to us. We create plans that check in on our progress. Just like someone tracks their workouts when trying to build muscle or lose weight, we learn to take the same approach to money.
5. Mindset and Sustainability: We are monitoring our mindset and learning how to cultivate growth that builds the right mental relationship to money. We don't want to create negative associations or a lot of mental "friction" on our journey. Wealth building takes many years, and we have to learn to enjoy the day-to-day ride!

Tactics

Finally, we get into the tactics that help us deliver on our goals. Most tactics at the surface level are the same from person to person. For instance, everyone needs to budget. But, what you budget for will be different based on your individual circumstance and interests. This is the fun part - you get to customize your tactics to align with your goals, strategies, and long-term vision!

Bringing it to Life

Through this system, you start taking action almost immediately. Think of a "crawl, walk, run" where you learn to take the first steps quickly so that you can build on your momentum to transform your situation. The Money Monk lesson plan is structured so that you can learn and take action as you go and snowball your progress.