Respect Money, But Don't Marry It
Anton Kreil's first secret to financial success is to respect money and be indifferent towards it. That sounds contradictory until you've spent enough of your life either chasing the stuff or watching other people become completely fucking obsessed with it.
I understand the respect part. I grew up in Glasgow in a working class family. Money wasn't some abstract number floating around on an investment app. Money paid the electricity bill, bought food and got you through the month. If there wasn't enough of it, you knew about it, and that stays with you. Even now, after building a business worth millions of dollars, I hate wasting money. I hate being ripped off. If somebody charges me £8 for something worth £2, the fact that I can afford the £8 doesn't suddenly make me enjoy being kicked in the bollocks. That's respect for money as far as I'm concerned.
The indifference part took me longer to understand. When I was living in South London before leaving Britain in 2006, money controlled far more of my life than I realised. Every month my salary arrived and everybody turned up with a bucket. The mortgage company had one, the council had one, the insurance company had one, the railway had a fucking enormous one. The car needed feeding, the flat needed feeding, everybody got a scoop and whatever remained belonged to me until the next collection.
So naturally I wanted to earn more. That's the obvious solution when you're younger. If the bucket isn't big enough, get a bigger bucket. Except something strange happens when you earn more money without changing the machinery underneath your life. The machinery gets bigger as well. Better salary, better house, better car, bigger mortgage, more expensive holidays, more stuff. You can spend your entire working life climbing the salary ladder while somebody quietly extends the ladder at the top.
I could see where that road went. Work harder, earn more, spend more, borrow more, repeat. It was a hamster wheel with a mortgage attached to it, so at 28 I did something that didn't make much financial sense according to the conventional script. I sold my flat in South London and left Britain.
I've written about the flat before because it's such a perfect example of how money can distort the way we judge decisions. London property went up enormously afterwards and had I kept the flat I'd have made a lot of money. I didn't. Instead I left, and twenty years later I've somehow survived this terrible financial catastrophe. I've lived in several countries, worked in the oil industry, travelled around the world and built a GIS company from one person into a business employing 43 people and worth millions of dollars.
So when somebody calculates what my old London flat would be worth today, I'm interested, but I'm not emotionally attached to the answer. Good for the flat. I did all right as well.
That's the indifference part for me. Money is useful, but I don't need every decision I've ever made to produce the maximum possible financial return. If I'd kept the flat, stayed in Britain and spent twenty years optimising the value of the bricks, perhaps I'd have more property wealth today. But I'd have had a completely different life, and there's no spreadsheet column for that.
I can't put Spain, Saudi Arabia, Japan, South Korea and Vietnam into a cell and ask Excel to calculate the return. I can't assign a neat percentage to building my own company. I can't calculate the compound annual growth rate of being able to wake up near the beach in Vietnam, spend part of the year in Malaysia, go to Seoul when the business needs me and return to Britain to see my family. Money made much of that possible, but money wasn't the point.
I respect money because money buys options. I don't worship money because there's no point having options if I never use the fucking things.
I've met people who seem to spend their entire lives accumulating money without ever reaching the number where they're prepared to enjoy what they've built. The target keeps moving. One million becomes two, two becomes five, five becomes ten. The bank balance gets fatter while their remaining Tuesdays disappear out the back door. I can make another £10,000. There isn't another 2026.
That's become more obvious as I've got older. At 28, money felt scarce and time felt endless. At 48, I've got a very different relationship with both. Money is renewable and time isn't. That doesn't mean I start throwing money around because I'm having an existential crisis beside a swimming pool. It means I understand what the money is for. It's there to support the life. The life isn't there to support the money.
Building my company changed this relationship more than anything else. I started it in South Korea in 2016 after working for an oil company. My former employer gave me the first contract in Saudi Arabia. I did the work, won another contract with another oil and gas company and kept building. For four years it was just me, then I hired my first employee, who is now my chief operating officer. Today there are 43 of us.
The company has become valuable, but the most important thing it has given me isn't a valuation. It's distance. Distance between me and somebody else's salary, between me and a single country, between me and having to accept every opportunity because I need the money. That's what financial success looks like to me. It's the ability to say no without the ceiling collapsing.
No to a bad deal, no to work I don't want, no to living somewhere because that's where the job happens to be. Money is incredibly useful for creating that distance, but there's another side to it. Once you've got enough money to create freedom, money itself can become the next prison if you aren't careful.
You can become frightened of losing it and start checking everything. The portfolio, the property value, the business valuation, the gold price, the bank balance, the pension. You've escaped the hamster wheel and built yourself a control room so you can spend all day watching the hamster wheel on seventeen different screens.
That's not freedom either.
I've got investments, a business and assets, and of course I care what they're worth. But I don't want to spend my life staring at the scoreboard. The scoreboard is supposed to tell me whether the machinery is working. It isn't supposed to become the reason I'm alive.
That's where Kreil's combination of respect and indifference makes sense to me. Respect means I don't piss money away, but indifference means money doesn't get a vote on every decision. Respect means I build assets, but indifference means I can sell one when it no longer suits my life. Respect means I built a company worth millions, but indifference means I don't need to sit in the office in Seoul every day admiring it. I can go to Vietnam and the machine can keep running.
That's the relationship with money I wanted without knowing how to describe it when I left Britain twenty years ago. I didn't want to be poor, but I didn't want to be ridiculously rich for the sake of being ridiculously rich either. I wanted enough control over money that money stopped controlling me.
There's a difference.
It's taken me twenty years, several countries, a sold London flat, a career in oil and gas and a company of 43 people to understand something that Kreil manages to fit into one sentence. Respect money and be indifferent towards it.
Fair enough.