Tom Corley - Rich Habits Poor Habits

Why do so few succeed in life?

Why are some people rich and other people poor?

What specific things are the rich doing every day that the rest of us arent?

Few ever find out the answers to these questions during their lifetime. Unfortunately, how to be successful in life is not a subject that is taught in our schools. We are all in the same boat, attempting through trial and error to figure it out on our own.

I understand the difference between being rich and poor because at age nine my family went from being multimillionaires to broke in just one night. As an adult, for five years, I observed and documented the daily activities of 233 wealthy people and 128 people struggling with poverty.

I discovered there is an immense difference between the habits of the wealthy, particularly self-made millionaires, and the poor.

You see... I grew up in a very religious family. Every Sunday we attended mass. Every Saturday was confession. I said the rosary every night before I went to sleep.
At a very early age I truly believed my calling in life was the priesthood. But things changed and, instead, I became a certified public accountant (CPA). Most CPAs I know are very moral and honest individuals. I suppose those not cut out for the priesthood become CPAs!
One of the things my mother would often recite to me was a biblical scripture in Matthew 19:24:
It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.

As a result, I grew up convinced that the pursuit and acquisition of wealth was a mortal sin and saw all wealthy individuals as sinners.
That all changed in 2009, after completing my analysis of my five-year study on the daily habits of the rich and poor. That study opened my eyes. I learned that wealthy individuals were not bad people. So many of them had devoted their time and money funding and running charitable organisations that helped poor people, disabled people, homeless people and those otherwise cast aside by society.

Rich people, I found, were among the finest human beings to walk the earth.

No, its not a sin to pursue and acquire wealth. In fact, I have come to believe that those who pursue and realise their dreams, and become wealthy in the process, are actually closer to God than those who sit in condemnation of them.

So, dont let ignorant ideologies hold you back from the pursuit of success. Unshackle yourself from them. Those who embrace the notion that the pursuit and acquisition of wealth is bad, are, in my opinion, the real sinners.

During my research I identified more than 300 daily activities that separated the haves from the have-nots. The culmination of this research can be found in my #1 bestselling book, Rich Habits: The Daily Success Habits of Wealthy Individuals .

Im also a certified financial planner (CFP) and hold a masters degree in taxation. As president of Cerefice and Company, CPAs, I head one of the premier financial firms in New Jersey.

Between 2004 and 2009 I devoted five years of my life to studying the daily activities of more than 350 rich and poor people to find out what the rich and the poor do from the time they wake up in the morning to the time they put their head on the pillow at night.

Thanks to my research, I was able to uncover exactly what the rich are doing right and what the poor are doing wrong. I incorporated what I learned into the Rich Habits Program which is designed to provide timely, easy-to-follow guidance on achieving unlimited personal and financial success.

Wealth is not just a by-product of random luck , advanced formal education, a superior work ethic or inheritance.

Success is a foolproof process. Within these pages is the 21st century blueprint for financial success and happiness!

The genesis of my research began when a struggling client came to my office seeking advice. The clients business was growing however he had difficulty in making ends meet, particularly at payroll time. In sheer desperation, he asked, What am I doing wrong?

For months I analysed his business, his expenses, processes, labour rates and industry comparative data. I even sought advice from a rich client in the same industry, with a similar level of gross revenues and whose business shared comparable demographics. After all of that work the only thing I had to show for my efforts was that my client was taking a salary that was about $40,000 more a year than my rich client.

At a lunch meeting with my struggling client, some weeks later, I confessed that the only variable that stood out was that slightly higher salary.

The client was not happy. I was not happy. We sat in silence at our table for some time. In an effort to break the uncomfortable silence I asked my client what he did for fun. That seemed to break the ice, as there was an immediate shift in my clients demeanour.

The client leaned in, eyeing the other tables at the restaurant and said ever-so-quietly, On Wednesday nights I get a couple of ladies of the night, a few bottles of wine and...

The client, in response to my obvious look of shock, stopped mid-sentence. Im sorry, he said. I shouldnt have shared that with you. I talk way too much sometimes.

I assured him that I was an Irish Catholic boy from New York raised in a family of eight. I told him that growing up in my family we looked at laws as mere obstacles to be overcome. There was very little I had not seen in my life.

My shock was not from moral indignation, but from the realisation that I had been asking my client all the wrong questions these past few months. I went on to ask him how much he spent on those Wednesday nights and how long he had been doing this. He confessed that when he got divorced some 10 years ago he adopted this Wednesday night habit.

He thought for a moment about what it cost and guessed those nights ran to about $500.

I did some quick math and determined that those Wednesday nights were costing him about $25,000 a year. I further determined that over the course of 10 years this one habit cost him about $350,000. This $350,000 was almost exactly what he owed on his companys line of credit that the bank had shut down. His additional $40,000 in salary was being used to fund his Wednesday night trysts. Worse, he was funding it with his line of credit!

That one habit ended up putting my client into bankruptcy.

The epiphany I had was that there was much more to financial success and failure than meets the eye. The devil was in the details.

The only way to uncover those details was to ask the right questions. I eventually came up with what I now call my 20-questions list.

This list is actually 144 questions, grouped into 20 categories. I asked these 144 questions to 233 rich people and 128 poor people over a five-year period. If you do the math, thats 51,984 questions. Of the 233 rich people, 177 were self-made millionaires; 31 per cent came from poverty and 45 per cent from the middle-class. It took me five years to complete my research and analyse the data.

The data I gathered from these 51,984 questions makes it clear that there is a difference the size of the Grand Canyon in the way rich people and poor people live their daily lives. This one client unknowingly took me down a path toward the discovery of the secret to financial success and that secret is our habits!

Our habits , good or bad, determine the financial circumstances of our lives . Those habits that lead to financial success I call the Rich Habits. Those habits that drag us down into poverty I call Poor Habits.

If you would like the list of questions plus the details of my research findings, please register your copy of this book at