When Am I Going to Make Money? Here's How to Time It Yourself.

"When am I going to make money?"

In the last 40 years, that's one of the two questions people have asked me most. They ask it nervously, or as a joke, or at the very end of a reading with one hand already on the door. But they ask it.

I'm the Firepig, and I'm going to give you the method I use to answer it. It isn't a secret and it isn't complicated. Most people just never get shown.

On Monday I told you the Golden Pig month, which runs to December 7, isn't golden for everybody. It's a wealth month for some people and not for others. Today I'll show you how to work out your own wealth periods, for any month, and for a lot more than months.

It matters now because everybody around you is reading about lucky times. It's important that you get it right when you time your luck, and getting it right takes five steps.

Step 1: Find Your Day Master

Everything starts here, and your birth year won't do it.

In Ba Zi, the standard astrology the feng shui experts use, the sign that tells the most about you is your day sign. It's called your Day Master. Like every sign, it has an element and an animal. For money, you want the element.

If you have your date of birth, a free Four Pillars calculator will give you your day sign. Write down its element. Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal or Water.

Why: the element of your day sign is what decides your wealth luck. Everything else in this method is measured against it.

Step 2: Find What Your Element Controls

Here's the whole rule in one sentence: you are in a good wealth period when your day element controls the element of the period you're looking at.

And here's the table.

If your day element is...	Your wealth period is a...
Wood	Earth period
Fire	Metal period
Earth	Water period
Metal	Wood period
Water	Fire period

Find your line. That second column is the element you're watching for from now on.

Why: you don't need to memorize the whole system. You need one line of it.

Step 3: Pick the Size of Time You Care About

Here's what most people don't realize. This rule isn't only for months. It works for the time of day, the lucky day, the lucky month and the lucky year. Every one of those has an element.

So before you look anything up, decide what you're actually trying to time. A year-long career move? Look at the year. A launch or an investment this season? Look at the month. A signature or an important meeting? Look at the day, or even the hour.

Why: a good year doesn't make every day good, and a good day doesn't rescue a bad plan. Match the size of the question to the size of the period.

Step 4: Check the Year and the Month First

Start big, because right now it's simple.

This is a Fire year, the Fire Horse. Water is the element that controls fire. So if your Day Master is Water, this is a good year for you to be making money.

This is an Earth month, the Earth Pig. Wood is the element that controls earth. So if your Day Master is Wood, this is your wealth month, through December 7.

If you're neither, that doesn't mean you're out of luck. It means you read your line in the table and watch for your element to come around. If you want to look further out, next year is the Fire Sheep, which is a fire year too, so it's the same element for the year.

A good wealth period doesn't put money in your hands. It tells you when your effort is most likely to pay.

Step 5: Now Look at Everything Else

This is the step people want to skip, and it's the reason I wrote a book.

You always have to look at many things. In The Mahjong Mirror I keep coming back to this: one perspective will fool you. The whole point of the Mirror is that you look at a decision from more than one angle before you trust what you're seeing.

Your wealth period is one angle. Here are the others. Your month sign has to be in harmony with this month's sign. Your year sign has to be in harmony with the year's sign. In order to have a super big stroke of luck, the kind where you win the lottery, all of those factors have to come into play at the same time.

So a Wood Day Master in an Earth month has a real advantage. If the month sign and year sign are working against that person, it's a smaller advantage. If they're all lined up, that's when I sit up and pay attention.

Why: the rule tells you where to look. It doesn't let you stop looking.

What to Do With the Answer

Say you've run the five steps and you've found your period. Now what?

Use it for the things that actually produce money. Doing well at the job that pays you. Asking for what you've earned. Making an investment you've already done your homework on. The wealth period is when that effort has its best chance.

And if you've found out your period isn't now, that's useful too. A word to the wise: the time to study your investment is before your month arrives, not during it.

After all these years, I can tell you that the people who ask "When am I going to make money?" are usually hoping for a date. I can give you something better than a date. I can give you a way of reading time that you'll have for the rest of your life.

If you want to learn how to look at the big decisions from all sides, that's exactly what the book is for: how to read a situation from more than one angle before you act.

Get The Mahjong Mirror

And if you'd like me to run the whole picture for you, your Day Master and all the factors around it, book a reading.