I Want to Be Rich!

Many people spend their lives chasing an abstract number in their checking account, thinking that saving a million dollars is the ultimate finish line. For Maurício Bastter Hissa, this obsession with account balances is a grave mistake: a static balance can be eroded by inflation, wiped out by crises, or devoured by hasty decisions in moments of distress.

The book teaches that genuine wealth must be measured exclusively by the flow of passive income generated by your assets. A truly wealthy investor builds a portfolio of businesses and properties that generate enough returns to comfortably cover their expenses, without needing to sell off pieces of their net worth to pay basic bills.

This shift transforms your strategy: instead of speculating by trying to guess whether a stock will go up tomorrow, you evaluate whether the company where you put your money is profitable, well-managed, and capable of sharing its earnings over decades.

No sustainable wealth-building plan can thrive on a short-sighted, complaining mindset. Bastter adopts a frank and provocative tone to shake the reader awake, stating that most people who complain about low salaries spend their weekends at bars discussing trivialities and blow their year-end bonuses on installment plans for vacations or electronics they cannot afford.

The first barrier to overcome is mental inertia: stop outsourcing the blame for your financial situation to the government, your boss, or the country's interest rates. Building wealth is a natural consequence of repeated habits of discipline, temporary sacrifice, and a continuous pursuit of education and productive work.

As long as you keep thinking that getting rich depends on a winning lottery ticket or a hot tip from a brokerage firm, your net worth will remain stagnant. Taking total responsibility for your earnings and expenses is the indispensable prerequisite for turning a new financial page.

The contemporary economic and advertising system was designed with almost surgical precision to keep the average citizen trapped on an endless treadmill of debt and dependency. Workers are encouraged day and night to buy things they do not need, with money they do not have, to impress neighbors and acquaintances they do not even truly respect.

This enslaving mechanism relies on seductive and destructive financial tools: seemingly endless auto loans, high-interest overdraft lines, and credit card payment plans with predatory rates. Every future monthly payment you take on compromises your freedom as a worker, forcing you to accept humiliation at work out of pure fear of not being able to pay the bills at the start of the next month.

Cutting these invisible shackles requires the courage to deliberately live below the standard of living that your salary would allow on paper. Those who learn to take public transit, keep a simple paid-off car, and feel no shame in living modestly acquire the freedom to save substantial portions of their income every month.