Wealth luck in the Four Pillars: is making money decided?

When you go to have your Four Pillars read, money always comes up.

"You have no Wealth star, so money won't stick to you."

"You have many Wealth stars, so this is a rich person's chart."

Hearing things like this, you end up hoping for nothing or worrying for nothing. Is making money really decided at birth?

To give the answer first: what a chart shows is not the balance in your bank account but the structure of how you and money are connected. What kind of work, and what amount, that structure will show up as is not decided by the characters of the chart alone.

As we saw in Lesson 4, the Wealth star (財星) is the force you control: what you hold in your hand and handle.

Direct Wealth (正財) is closer to a steady share that keeps coming in; Indirect Wealth (偏財) is closer to a share that moves in large amounts.

Money does belong here. But the Wealth star is less money itself than the power to handle, manage and put something to work. So having a Wealth star does not make money pile up on its own, and lacking one does not make money pass you by.

The Di Tian Sui (滴天髓) tells the rich and the poor apart with these words.

The standard the old book used was not the number of Wealth stars. It looked at whether the energy of the Wealth star flows unblocked and connected to you, and whether that Wealth star is a force welcome to you.

Even with many Wealth stars, if you cannot carry them, other people's money only passes before your eyes. The old phrase is "a poor man in a rich house" (富屋貧人).

Conversely, even with just one Wealth star, if it is well connected to you, your household grows solid. The old book, too, was looking at flow rather than the amount of money from the start.

In the past there were not many ways to make money. You inherited land, held office, or went into trade, and that was about it.

The family you were born into was your fortune, and it was hard to change your station. In the order of scholars, farmers, artisans and merchants (士農工商), trade was looked down on, and wealth was read as the groundwork for rising to office (Wealth generating Officer, 財生官).

With only a few paths, the saying "a good Wealth star makes you rich" came true fairly easily. It was an era in which it was easy to talk as if wealth were fixed by the chart.

The gates (門戶) the Di Tian Sui spoke of are far more numerous today.

Gates that were once few have now multiplied. Even with the same Wealth star, the way you earn and how much can differ greatly depending on which gate it passes through.

There is no need to be frightened if you are told you have no Wealth star. People with no Wealth star often earn through other gates rather than holding and moving money directly.

If the power to create (Output stars) is clear, skill and work become money. If the power to learn and build up (Resource star) is clear, qualifications and knowledge become money.

But as we said in Lesson 4, with no Wealth star the management skills to handle money and a household tend to be weaker. Keeping becomes more of a task than earning.

Keeping track of income and spending, writing down plans for a few years ahead in numbers, and dividing roles with someone who is good at managing can fill that gap.

There are times when a Wealth star comes in through your ten-year luck or the luck of a single year. They tend to be read as periods when money-related opportunities increase.

But luck only tells you the timing; it does not earn for you. Even when the same luck arrives, it tends to become real results for someone who prepared, and to pass as an opportunity in name only for someone who only waited.

So rather than asking "when will money come in," it is better to ask first, "what will I be holding in my hands at that time?"

Don't look at the Wealth star alone. Look at what sits beside it in your chart as well.

Whether your money comes in as salary, through business, or through what you make cannot be settled by the characters of a chart alone. See which paths historical figures with a similar temperament chose in their own era, and compare them directly with the paths open to you now.