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Dr. Charles Barugahare- October 13, 2026
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You don’t need a hundred money rules. You need three you’ll actually remember, and live by.
Why fewer rules work better
Here is a question I like to start with: how many rules can you hold in your head at once?
The Old Testament contains 613 commandments. Be honest; can you remember them? Almost nobody can. So, they were summarized into the Ten Commandments. Better, right? But can you recite all ten right now, in order, without checking?
Then came an even shorter summary: love your neighbour as yourself. Now that is something nobody forgets. Ask me about God’s commandments and that is the line I will give you first.
The point of shrinking the list was never to water it down. It was to make the rules remembered and applied. A rule you can’t recall in the moment of temptation is not of much use.
Money works the same way. There are countless rules, tips and formulas out there. Richard Templer cut them down to one simple idea: money is about how to make it, and how to hold onto it. Hard to forget, isn’t it?
But if you summarise too much, you lose some of the gist of the matter. So, let’s find the middle ground. In this article I want to give you just three essential rules, enough to guide real decisions, few enough to carry with you every day:
- We are stewards, not owners, of money.
- Apply simplicity, subtraction, and reduce standard stupidities.
- Stay in the game to survive.
Let’s take them one at a time.
Rule 1: You are a steward, not an owner
Straight forward question. How much of the salary you earn is really yours?
The rent money belongs to your landlord. The school fees belong to the school. The food money belongs to the market and the shop. You are simply holding it on their behalf until the due date. What is truly yours is what remains after all of that is covered.
This is where the two mindsets part ways.
The owner mindset says: “I earned this money. It’s mine. I’ll do what I like with it.” So, you spend freely. Then rent falls due. Then fees. And before you know it, you are at the bank asking for a loan, or worse, at a moneylender’s door; just to pay for things you already knew were coming.
The steward mindset says: “This money has been entrusted to me. I will use it wisely, generously and responsibly; and I will be accountable for it.”
Notice how the question changes. It moves from “What do I want to do with my money?” to “What is the wisest, most responsible use of what I’ve been given?”
This is not about stopping you from enjoying your money. It is about holding money with open hands; with purpose and with accountability. Once that sinks in, the way you handle every shilling starts to shift.
Everything belongs to the Almighty
The second way to see this rule goes deeper. The earth is the Lord’s, and everything in it. Your salary, your assets, your bank balance, your home; they are all placed in your hands to manage, like seeds, for God’s glory.
Remember the Parable of the Talents? A master hands money to his servants, goes away, and later returns to ask each one what they did with it. One day, each of us will face that same question about what we were trusted with.
That is why Saint Paul never says money is evil. He says the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil (1 Timothy 6:10). Money turns harmful when your wallet becomes your security, your identity, or your master. It turns evil when it is used to:
- buy power that bends laws and politics in the wrong direction
- exploit other people
- pay bribes and feed corruption
- damage and destroy relationships
But money used to care for your family, lift your community, support the poor and honour God? There is nothing evil in that at all.
So here is a reminder that Rule 1 in one is: you are a steward, not an owner.
Rule 2: Keep it simple, subtract, and reduce the “standard stupidities”
- a) Simple is not the same as easy
William Green describes investing in very simple terms: find a business, a property, a good or a service you can buy well below its market value. Later, sell it at market value. Keep the difference.
Simple, right? But simple does not mean easy. How do you spot something that is truly underpriced? That takes skill, and skill comes from investing in yourself first. Once you have it, investing can become simple.
Managing money is the same. “Know where your money goes” sounds obvious. You shop, you contribute to functions, you pay school fees, rent and the food bill at home. But sit down tonight and try to account for every shilling from last month. Not so easy. Do what the top 1% do.
People who handle money well tend to do a few things consistently:
- They separate needs from wants. Shelter, food and clothing come first. The rest can wait.
- They decide in advance where money goes, across four buckets:
- Essentials: what you need to live.
- Growth: new skills, assets and investments. Most of them start small.
- Rewards: fun, enjoyment and giving back socially.
- Emergencies: for the things nobody plans for.
- They respect those buckets. And honestly, this is where most of us fall down. Planning the buckets is the easy part. Keeping our hands out of the wrong one is the hard part.
- b) The power of subtraction
Subtraction is about doing less of what doesn’t matter, so you can do more of what does. In practice, it looks like this:
- Spend less on simply impressing other people.
- Strip the complexity out of your money affairs.
- Clear out commitments you never really needed.
- Buy fewer things but better, and more useful ones.
- Cut back on lifestyle clutter.
Terry Pratchett captured the cost of not doing this beautifully. A wealthy man, he observed, buys one good pair of boots that lasts for years. A poor man can only afford cheap boots that fall apart in a few months; so, he keeps buying them. Over time, the poor man spends far more on boots, and still has wet feet.
Subtraction is how you escape that trap: less clutter, fewer leaks, more value.
- c) Reduce your “standard stupidities”
Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett’s long-time partner, put it bluntly. If you could focus on just one thing in life, he suggested, it should be steadily reducing your level of standard stupidities: the mistakes we make even though we already know better.
You have probably seen a few of these:
- You have money set aside for essentials, then you risk it on betting.
- You know adultery destroys families, and you do it anyway.
- You know drinking and driving can kill, and you drive home anyway.
- You know you cannot afford that rent, and you sign the lease anyway.
- You know an international school is beyond your means, and you enroll the children anyway.
None of these are failures of knowledge. They are failures of discipline. And the good news is that discipline can be built. If we reduce at our standard stupidities, slowly and deliberately, we take back control of our lives and of our finances.
Rule 3: Stay in the game
My financial mentor once told me something I have never forgotten: if you lose everything else, keep hope alive.
Financial life has seasons. Some are full and generous. Others are lean and painful. The goal is not to win every season. It is to still be standing so that when the next good one arrives, you are still faithful, wise and resilient through all of them.
Wisdom, in money terms, means protecting your ability to keep going: to keep serving, providing, giving and persevering, whatever comes. In practice, that means:
- Don’t gamble with what you’ve been trusted with. Greed and speculation have wiped out more families than bad luck ever has.
- Choose contentment over endless accumulation. Enough is a real number. Learn yours.
- Persevere with faith. Slow progress is still progress.
- Expect hard seasons. Plan for them now, while things are good, that is what your emergency bucket is for.
- Be wary of “Buy Now, Pay Later schemes.” Read it honestly and it usually means you can’t afford this now.
The people who build lasting wealth are rarely the boldest. They are the ones who never had to leave the game.
The three rules to carry with you
You won’t remember 613 rules in the Old Testament. You may not even remember ten. But you can remember three:
- We are stewards, not owners, of money.
- Apply simplicity, subtraction and reduce standard stupidities.
- Stay in the game to survive.
And if anyone asks you one money rule, you already know the answer: how to make it, and how to hold onto it.
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