the richest man in atherstone

I've been keeping this website updated for the past 12 months or so as my own personal financial journal. I've been meaning to publish it on the Internet for a while now but, for various reasons, haven't got around to it.

The other day, I started looking into the viability of using Google Adsense as an income stream. It works by adding a bit of code to your website to display Google adverts. If they are clicked on by visitors, the website owner gets a cut of the payment that Google recieves from the advertisers. According to a lot of people in Internet-Land, they've made a fair bit of money from this.

I have lots of ideas for ad-driven websites but realised it would be quicker and easier to simply publish a website I already had. This way I could test the viability of the idea without spending weeks/months designing and writing content for a new website idea. It seems the trick to making a profitable Google Adsense website is by writing good content and providing useful information to the visitors.

This website was originally intended for my own personal record of my financial life since being inspired by the book 'The Richest Man in Babylon' by George S. Clason. I think that a lot of the posts and articles I have written would interesting to similar-minded people as well as giving ideas and inspiration for people to look after their own personal finances. Some of the posts may even be entertaining to some.

Therefore, I have decided to publish this website on the Internet for public viewing. The hardest part was coming up with a name. After brainstorming many ideas and discarding most, I chose TheRichestManInAtherstone.co.uk. I live close to the town of Atherstone and the website was inspired the book of a similar name.

I have bought the domain name and now intend to go through each of the posts to make sure they are publishable. This means removing all my curse-words and changing names to protect the innocent. I'll also add some extra details so that people that don't know me will understand what I'm talking about. I've set a launch date of 31 May 2006.

I hope that visitors will enjoy my writing and take away with them useful information. I'd also be grateful for any feedback on any of my posts. Hopefully, by doing this I can improve my writing as well!

The highly acclaimed and best-selling personal finance book, The Richest Man in Babylon by George S. Clason consists of a number of stories based in ancient Babylonia that offer advice on how any man can become wealthy.

The fantastic thing about this book is that the laws supposedly hold true today as much as they did 8000 years ago.

I have a deep desire to retire before the age of 50 a wealthy man and so, after reading this book and becoming inspired by it's text, I have decided to dedicate the next 5 years of my life abiding by the rules and laws identified and discussed therein.

This website is my online journal of the trials and tribulations of my financial life as I live according Clason's fables.

I was reading through 'The Richest Man in Babylon' for the umpteenth time today and realised that over the previous 12 months, I haven't been following Clason's rules as closely as I should have been. I've included a couple of quotes from the book below that prompted me to reassess my saving system.

"...make your treasure work for you. Make it your slave. Make its children and its children's children work for you."

"Behold, from my humble earnings I had begotten a hoard of golden slaves, each labouring and earning more gold. As they laboured for me, so their children also laboured and their children's children until great was the income from their combined efforts."

The mistake I have been making is to not pump the interest I have earned from my savings back into my savings. You may recall that I last year, I set myself a target to save up £4'500 for my 'Emergency Fund'. I achieved my goal but I didn't use the interest earned for the same purpose. I'm not sure exactly what happened to it but I assume I must have spent it. I probably withdrew the extra to leave myself with a nice round figure of £4'500 at the end of the year.

Here lies the problem. I often have money bouncing around between my savings and current accounts. This is because I get a better interest rate with my savings account, so it makes sense to store cash that is not immediately required there. Obviously this leads to confusion over what cash belongs where as savings and expenditure money is constantly getting mixed up.

I decided that I needed to change my system to segregate my money into how it will be used. I opened two more Lloyds TSB Online Savers in addition to the one I use for my savings.

The first I called 'Cash'. This will be used for money due to be spent on my monthly bills and cash withdrawals. All my bills are Direct Debit and I know when the money will be debitted from my current account, so it will just be a matter of transferring the cash to my current account a day or so before the bill is due.

The second is called 'Expenditures'. I will use this account for yearly or irregular expenses such as home and car insurance, MOT, road tax, dentist bills etc. It will also be used for unexpected costs such as my car breaking down or tax underpayments. I've suffered both of these surprises in recent years and would prefer to be prepared for them if they should happen again.

Looking into the figures, I have calculated that each month I will make a deposit of £208 into my Savings Online Saver and £143 into my Expenditures Online Saver. The remainder, give or take a couple of hundred quid 'float' will go into my Cash Online Saver and transferred back to my current account in chunks whenever a bill is due.

I rearranged my money to reflect the changes I made as if I had started from the beginning of the year.

Now I should have no reason to 'lose' the interest I earn on my Savings and the children of my money will go on to create children of their own increasing my wealth as only compound interest knows how.