5. The first auxiliary rule for becoming rich is to stay in school or, if out of school, go back to it. Of course, to stay in school is not enough and they will learn something worth the time and effort. It never has been easier to get an education. Public schools are free for the taking. College costs have been rising steadily relative to family income level for more than a decade. However, the rate of return on a college education has been rising as well, making the investment a good deal. Meanwhile, the cost of self-education has fallen with the multitude of sources of knowledge and information available on CD-ROMs and the Internet.

6. The second auxiliary rule for becoming rich is to pick your education carefully. Teachers will find getting rich tougher than engineers, given that the former can expect to earn half as much over their careers. History and music professors can expect to earn less than accounting professors. For that matter, history and music professors can expect to earn a lot less than their students who major in business.

7. The third auxiliary rule for becoming rich is to marry someone with an equal or higher education, and then stay married. By itself, marriage seems to provide a stable institutional setting that promotes greater earnings, which affords greater savings. Married couples not only earn more than non-married people, they tend to economize on the costs of running their households, allowing them to save and invest at higher rate. Moreover, the binding legal contracts at the foundation of marriages, which reflect their personal commitments to each other, give the couple an added economic incentive to invest in the joint assets of the union.

8. The fourth auxiliary rule is to be able to work and save for a long time. Alcoholics and drug addicts who are not yet rich are unlikely candidates for becoming so. They will be unable to work long and hard enough to earn the requisite incomes, and their careers will be full of instability, if they can even have careers. Most will drink, inject, or smoke up whatever incomes they earn; their suppliers undoubtedly will get rich at the expense of their customers—the addicts.

9. From our perspective, becoming rich is really a matter of choice. Opportunity to do so abound. Of course, recognizing that you can choose to become rich does not mean that you should. As we have noted, choosing to become rich requires sacrifices that many people quite rationally have chosen not to make. One can lead a life rich in satisfaction and accomplishment without becoming rich financially, and nothing we have written here is meant to suggest otherwise.