Regardless of how much you may or may not know about personal finance, implementation of basic financial principles is key to building wealth. Take myself for example, as a financial analyst I know tons of financial formulas that are used for everything from bond valuation, equity valuation and derivative valuation; unfortunately, I never took the time to create a simple personal financial plan for paying myself first. A principle that The Richest Man in Bablyon refers to as, "A Part of All You Earn is Yours to Keep".
Reading this book again may seem like child's play but it is essential to reinforcing the basic principles that lead to amassing wealth. Once you're wealthy you can worry about the fancy things like level 3 options strategies, arbitrage-free bond valuation or trading non-directional market volatility.
Many years ago, during a piano lesson, I was struggling with a particular passage of one of Beethoven's later sonatas which are known for their technical difficulty. When I finished the movement I looked to my teacher for a profound bit of wisdom that would improve my technique. She looked at me for a moment, asked me what key the sonata was in, and upon telling her it was in E-Major, she told me to spend the next week doing scales and arpeggios in the key of E-Major and the respective modulations that occur during the piece. To a non-musician this may sound like a complex instruction, when in actuality scales and arpeggios are really basic techniques that are taught to beginning pianists.
The more you know about a particular subject, the more imperative it becomes to review the basics from time to time. Otherwise, our own bad habits will become the burdensome chains that prevent any further financial progress.
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