The Richest Man in Babylon, Retold for 2026 (Part 1): The Freedom Account

This is Part 1 of a 7-part series where I'm retelling the money lessons from The Richest Man in Babylon as a story set in 2026.

The Richest Man in Babylon is one of the most important money books I've ever read.

It's also one of the hardest to get through.

"Start thy purse to fattening." "Guard thy treasures from loss." Gold coins, camel traders, money lenders, clay tablets.

The lessons are pure gold (pun intended). But a lot of people put the book down by page 20 because it sounds like it was written for somebody who rides a camel to work.

So I'm doing something different.

I'm taking the seven "cures for a lean purse" from the book and telling them as a story that could happen on your street this year. Same lessons. Modern problems. Plain English.

If you've been reading my stuff for a while, some of the mentor's story might sound a little familiar. 😉

Marcus was standing at pump 6 when his card got declined.

It was Wednesday. He'd been paid on Friday.

He tried it again, the way you do, like the machine might change its mind.

Declined.

He was 34. He ran the service desk at a truck dealership and made decent money. More than his dad ever made. His wife Jess worked full time at the school district office.

Between the two of them, they brought home good money. And somehow, every single month, it was gone.

The truck payment. The SUV payment. The rent that went up again in January. Two phone plans. Six streaming apps, two of which nobody could remember signing up for. DoorDash three nights a week because everybody was tired. A "buy now, pay later" couch.

None of it felt crazy. That's what made it so frustrating.

He dug a credit card out of his wallet, filled up, and drove home doing math he didn't like.

There was a guy at the end of Marcus's road everybody called Jim.

Jim lived on a few acres in a manufactured home nobody would call fancy. He drove a truck that was at least 12 years old. He worked from home, and on a random Tuesday afternoon you could find him out in the shop tinkering on a mini bike with one of his boys.

Marcus had never seen Jim in a hurry. He'd never seen him stressed about money either.

So that Saturday, Marcus walked down the road, leaned on the fence, and asked him straight out.

"How do you do it? You don't even have a regular job. I work fifty hours a week and I'm broke by Wednesday."

Jim set down his wrench and wiped his hands on a rag.

"You want the long answer or the short one?"

"Short."

"A part of all you earn is yours to keep."

Marcus waited for the rest of it. There wasn't any.

"That's it?"

"That's the first rule. It comes from an old book called The Richest Man in Babylon. Back then they said it like this: for every ten coins you put in your purse, take out only nine to spend."

"So save 10%."

"Pay yourself first," Jim said. "Before the truck payment. Before the landlord. Before DoorDash. The first bill you pay every payday is to you."

"Right now, when your paycheck hits, who gets paid first?"

Marcus thought about it. The truck. The landlord. Visa. Netflix.

"Everybody but me."

"That's why you're broke by Wednesday. You're working for everybody but yourself."

Marcus shook his head. "Man, I can't afford to save 10%. There's nothing left."

"You can't afford not to," Jim said. "And honestly? 10% is too small."

Marcus laughed.

Jim didn't.

He pulled a couple of lawn chairs out of the shop and told him a story.

"When my wife and I got married, we lived in a 1984 single-wide mobile home. She was a dental assistant. I sat in a call center cubicle answering customer service calls for $11.09 an hour."

"One night we were reading a book about money, and it hit us both at the same time. Someday we wanted a house. But we didn't want to spend the next 30 years paying a bank for it."

"So we sat down on that living room couch and made a plan. We figured between the two of us, we could save about $1,000 a month. Do that for five years and we'd have $60,000. That's a real down payment."

"On eleven bucks an hour?" Marcus asked.

"On eleven bucks an hour. Once we understood that the faster we piled up savings, the faster we'd be free, we basically said, forget the 10%. We're going to save everything we possibly can. Keep our expenses as low as possible and save the rest."

"That's a big reason we lived in a trailer. On purpose."

"I had a mentor back then named Art Williams. He used to say, 'Be lean and mean.' He also said this, and it changed the way I looked at everything:"

"A lot of people will tell you to live within your means. I think that's a big mistake. If you're trying to reach a special goal, like my goal of financial independence, you've got to live below your means."

"Art decided to save 50% of every paycheck. Fifty. Not ten."

"So we started saving. And the money started piling up."

"Here's the part I didn't see coming. Before we ever got to that down payment, a piece of land came up for sale with another mobile home already on it. We were able to buy it for almost exactly what we had saved."

"We came up a little short, so we borrowed a bit from my brother-in-law. Paid him back fast. And just like that, we owned it. Land and a home. Debt-free."

"If we hadn't started saving on that couch, that deal would have come and gone and we'd never have known it was ours for the taking. The money was ready when the opportunity showed up."

Marcus was quiet for a minute.

"Here's what most people miss," Jim said. "To have money, you have to have money. Sounds dumb, but it's true. You've got to get in the habit of always having a little money sitting there."

"Napoleon Hill called it the habit of saving, and he made it one of his laws of success."

"Money is magnetic. Those little dollars you save start calling out to other little dollars. 'Hey, come hang out. It's fun over here. We're well taken care of.'"

Marcus grinned. "And my dollars?"

"Your dollars get kicked out of the house every Friday. They don't stick around because nobody's taking care of them."

"So what do I actually do?" Marcus asked. "Like, this week."

"First, stop calling it a savings account," Jim said. "It's not a savings account. It's a freedom account."

"Every dollar in there buys back a little piece of your time. A month you don't have to panic. A deal you can say yes to. A day you don't have to ask a boss for."

"Second, find one expense you can get rid of. Just one, this week. Then take that exact amount and put it in the freedom account instead."

Marcus pulled out his phone right there in the lawn chair and opened his subscriptions.

Two streaming apps he hadn't opened since summer. $34 a month.

He cancelled both. Then he opened a separate account, named it FREEDOM in all caps, and set up an automatic $34 transfer for every payday.

It wasn't much. Jim said that was fine.

"The amount doesn't matter yet. The habit does. The amount grows once the habit's in place."

Okay, back to you and me for a second.

The book says save at least 10% of everything you earn. I say that's the floor, not the goal. The faster you pile it up, the faster you're free.

But you don't have to move into a trailer this weekend to get started. (Although it worked out pretty well for us. 😉)

Here's your homework:

Find one expense you can eliminate this week. A subscription, a delivery habit, a payment you forgot you even had.

Send that exact amount to a separate freedom account, automatically, every payday. Name it Freedom. Words matter. Pay yourself before anyone else gets a dime.

And if you want your freedom account earning more than the 0.15% my local credit union pays, I shared a few better places to park it in my post on making your money work harder than you do.

Before Marcus headed home, he asked one more question.

"Okay. But I'm still broke by Wednesday. Where's the rest of this freedom money supposed to come from?"

Jim grinned. "That's the second rule. And you're not going to like it at first."

"Come back next Saturday. Bring your bank statement."

In Part 2, Jim shows Marcus how to control what goes out, why clipping coupons is mostly a distraction, and a little mortgage math that might make you sick to your stomach.

Until then, tell me in the comments: what's the one expense you're cutting this week to start your freedom account?

Thanks for reading and whatever you do, always go for your dreams!