This online version of The Money Cookbook is an excerpt from the full book which can be purchased here. What you discover here is all about money! It's about giving people a recipe to use their money the right way and have a successful life. The key ingredient to this part of their lives is money.


We all have to eat, don't we? Because we have to eat and because money's very important in our lives as well, the cooking analogy is laser-sharp. Food and money are both cornerstones of a healthy life. You need to eat well and you need to spend and invest money wisely too.

This is basically a simple system. What I’m going to show you in the next few chapters is a modern recipe to organise your cash and build wealth, no matter what stage of life you're at.

What Do You Want To Cook?

To begin your money recipe, you need to ask yourself what you really want and determine whether you have what you need to create that in your life.

When I begin talking to people, I help them answer that first question: what do you really want? This is a very important question and one of the hardest to understand and answer.

So, we need to spend some time here really discovering what sort of things that you want to do over the period of your life. Of course, those things will change from time to time.

What should your life menu look like at this stage? For instance, there might be some things that you want to achieve in the next few years, or there could be things that you want to achieve in ten years time and beyond. Do you want to go to school, start a career, buy a new house, start a family, open a business, plan for retirement, or travel?

One of the key areas here in discovering goals—discovering the things that you want to achieve—is to think about, if you had all the money that you really needed and wanted, what would you do? What things would you want to achieve and how would you go about your life, if you had that money right now?

Recipe Stages

Let’s look at three specific stages in building your recipe.

The first stage is to determine your short-term goals. This could encompass a wide variety of objectives, such as repaying debt, purchasing motor vehicles, buying a home, or starting up your pension plan. Think about what you want to accomplish in three years and how you can go about achieving those.

The second stage is to determine your three-to-ten-year goals. This list may include some of the same items from your short-term goal list, but it might bring up all sorts of other things because you may have moved as a person into a different stage. Here is when you might be planning on having children or starting a business; you could still be repaying debt. Because it's a different stage, you need to look at your recipe in a different way. You may choose other products to achieve this next set of goals.

The third stage is to determine your long-term goals. On this list would be your retirement goals. You would ask yourself, “What do I really think I'm going to do down the track when I ultimately retire at 65 or 70 or whenever that's going to be?”

We're all different there...