This is the first of two blog posts by Tobi Elliott

You don’t need to hang out with the very rich – or buy the books of those who claim they will “make you rich” – to start figuring out some financial truths. Just watch and copy what you think might work for you.

Take TIGER 21, for example. “The Investment Group for Enhanced Results in the 21st Century” is a very tight enclave of 12-14 very rich people who advise each other on how to manage their wealth. Members of the exclusive New York-based club share their knowledge about markets, investments, refer each other to money managers or advisors they feel comfortable and safe with, and must each defend his investment portfolio to the group.

It was started over a decade ago by real estate entrepreneur Michael Sonnenfeldt, who, after selling his business and turning to advisors to ask what to do with the money he made, felt everyone just wanted to sell him something. Not about to trust his money to people who didn’t have his best interests at heart, Sonnenfeldt looked to his peers instead: men who were in a similar income bracket and faced the same challenges, and formed TIGER 21.

So if these people, wealthy beyond anything we can probably imagine, meet to get advice from their peers, what’s stopping the rest of us? The snag for those in the, shall we say, less-than-billionaire-income-bracket, is we’re often ashamed to admit we don’t know what to do with money. Or we believe that we’ve screwed up so badly with it, that we are responsible to figure out how to fix it. Or we’re simply in denial that we’re in a deeper mess than we’d like to believe.

Desperate to make a change, we decide to try something different.

But instead of looking at the root problem of why we got into this mess in the first place, sometimes we end up trying to buy a solution to our problem. Some of us even end up trying to spend our way out of financial stress, which of course, is a bit like trying to add salt to the ocean to give it a bit of flavour.

We might get a short-term loan with high interest just “to tide me over.” We might give what little money we have to someone who professes to know what they’re doing and tells us it will double in a year. Or we might even fall for an Internet generated quick-fix solution or a get-rich fast scheme. Or…

Learn more about the solution we propose in the second post!