George Clason

George Samuel Clason was an American businessman and author, born in Louisiana, Missouri in 1874, who wrote the parables collected as The Richest Man in Babylon. He served in the United States Army during the Spanish-American War and founded the Clason Map Company of Denver, which was the first firm to publish a road atlas of the United States and Canada. The map business did not survive the Great Depression. He passed away in Napa, California in 1957.

The financial writing began in 1926 as a series of pamphlets, issued by banks and insurance companies to their customers, in which he explained saving and lending through short stories set in ancient Babylon. The setting was a device rather than a historical claim: Babylon stood for the oldest place he could put a familiar problem, so a reader could hear advice about their own wages without feeling lectured. The pamphlets circulated widely and were later collected into the book.

The best-known instruction is to keep a fixed share of everything earned before any other claim on it, the practice usually summarised as paying yourself first, a phrase he is credited with coining. The parables also cover repaying debt while continuing to save rather than waiting until debt is cleared, protecting capital before seeking a return on it, and treating advice from people without relevant experience as worth very little.

What is documented about the man himself is limited, and this profile does not go beyond it. The dates, the military service, the map company and its failure, and the publication history are established. His family background, the details of the publishing business and his reasons for choosing the subject are not well recorded, and the book has outlived almost everything else known about him.

The central instruction is sequencing rather than arithmetic. A fixed share of income is set aside before any other claim is met, which converts saving from whatever remains at the end of a month into a first charge on earnings. The specific proportion in the parables is a tenth, though the argument does not depend on the figure: what matters is that the share is fixed in advance and taken first, so the decision is not remade under pressure every month.

The second theme is that debt and saving run alongside each other rather than in sequence. The parable of the man clearing his obligations has him repay creditors from part of his income while continuing to set aside his own share, on the reasoning that a person who saves nothing until debt is gone has no protection when the next shock arrives and simply borrows again. This is a genuine and still-live disagreement with programmes that put debt elimination entirely first.

A third strand concerns competence and advice. The parables repeatedly show capital lost by handing it to people with no relevant experience, a brickmaker judging jewels being the standard example, and the recommendation is to seek guidance from those whose own record is in the relevant field. That is a durable point about who to listen to, and it applies to the book itself as much as to anything else.

Pay yourself first passed out of his book and into ordinary financial vocabulary, to the point where most people using the phrase have never heard his name. It is now the standard framing for automatic saving, including payroll deduction and automated transfers.

The book remains a common first recommendation for readers new to the subject, and its narrative approach influenced a long line of later personal finance writing that teaches through story rather than through rules.