The resources line: Wealth, Career and Property

The three cells of the resources line

• Wealth Palace: how you earn and spend, and your attitude toward money. It looks at "flow".
• Career Palace: work and career, and also things that take sustained effort, like study and exams. It looks at "method".
• Property Palace: home, where you live and real estate, and whether you can keep hold of things. It looks at "stock".

Connected to the Life Palace

The Wealth and Career Palaces are the two trine palaces of the Life Palace, so you see them whenever you read the Life Palace. Practitioners often say that how a person earns and works is naturally an extension of their personality. If your Life Palace star is impatient, the pace at which you earn and work is often hard to slow down too. This is the San Fang Si Zheng, covered in the next lesson.

The Property Palace isn't part of the Life Palace's San Fang Si Zheng; it faces the Children Palace. So when someone earns well and does well at work yet never manages to save, the ancients look at the Property Palace rather than the Wealth Palace.

How the classics describe these three cells

When volume two of the *Quan Shu* describes each star in the Wealth Palace, it focuses on "where the money comes from": Tian Ji "makes wealth through mental effort and hard work", relying on brains and planning; Tian Fu is "well provided for", able to hold on to it. For the Property Palace, it focuses on "whether it stays": Tian Ji "leaves the ancestral home to build anew", not inclined to keep the old family property and preferring to create something of its own.

In today's terms: with Tian Ji in Wealth, you're suited to earning through ideas and expertise, taking on projects; with Tian Ji in Property, you move often and love redecorating, and would rather live somewhere you chose than in a house you inherited. The same star in a different cell says something different.

The Career Palace looks at how you work

The Career Palace doesn't tell you which industry you'll be in. It's more about how you tend to get things done. People with Zi Wei in the Career Palace, for example, include managers and shop owners alike; what they share is wanting to be the one who makes the call. Volume two says Zi Wei in the Career Palace needs to be "at Miao or Wang and meet Zuo Fu, You Bi, Wen Chang, Wen Qu, Tian Kui and Tian Yue" for high position and power, meaning it needs helpers around it; going it alone is harder.

The "palace lords" in the classics

The "Zhu Xing Wen Da Lun" in volume one says Wu Qu "is lord of the Wealth Palace", Tai Yin "is lord of the Property Palace" and Tian Fu "is master of the Wealth Palace". That is, these stars' personalities are naturally in tune with money and home: Wu Qu is practical and decisive, the earning type; Tai Yin is attentive and values security, the homemaking type; Tian Fu is steady and conservative, the type that guards the vault. It doesn't matter if they aren't in your Wealth or Property Palace; Chapter 2 introduces them one by one.

What the opposite cells look at

• Wealth faces Fortune: how you spend often has to do with what you want inside.
• Career faces Spouse: work and love pull on each other, and when one side is full, the other often has to give a little.
• Property faces Children: home, and the people you bring up.

Common misunderstandings

Good stars in the Wealth Palace don't mean you'll be rich, and challenging stars there don't mean you'll be poor. It describes your relationship with money: some people earn a lot and spend it just as fast, while others have an ordinary income but manage it very well.

The resources line looks at patterns, not the numbers in your bank account. Once you know whether you're best at earning, working or holding on, you know which part to get help with. If you're great at earning but not at keeping, sharing the household budget with a roommate or partner who loves tracking expenses is often easier than forcing yourself to change.