BaZi Wealth Luck: Having Wealth, Carrying It, Finding the Road, and the Timing

"Is there money in my chart?" is probably the question fortune tellers hear most. Yet people with plenty of Wealth stars are not always well off, and people with few are not always poor. An old line says a strong Day Master "can bear wealth." Reading wealth luck has never meant counting Wealth stars; it means checking whether four things line up: the wealth, the self, the road and the timing.

What the Wealth star is: the element you control

In BaZi the Day Master, the Heavenly Stem of the day you were born, stands for you. What you control is your Wealth. Wood controls Earth, so Earth is the Wealth of a Wood Day Master; Fire controls Metal, so Metal is the Wealth of a Fire Day Master, and so on. The Wealth star comes in two kinds. Where its yin-yang polarity differs from the Day Master's, it is Direct Wealth (zheng cai 正財): a steady salary, dependable income. Where the polarity matches, it is Indirect Wealth (pian cai 偏財): bonuses, sales commission, investments, side work, money that moves.

Each of the ten Day Masters has a different Wealth, so the step "I am a Metal Day Master and my Wealth is Wood" is where any wealth reading begins. For how Direct and Indirect Wealth differ in character, see Direct Wealth and Indirect Wealth.

How we counted: our engine cast one chart for every day from 1960 to 2005, rotating the birth hour, 16,802 charts in all. This describes how chart structures are distributed; it says nothing about how much money anyone has.

Fewer than one person in ten has no Wealth star at all. Most charts do have Wealth; the real differences lie in the three questions below.

Question one: can you carry it?

Wealth is something the Day Master has to control and manage, and that takes strength. A strong Day Master can handle it; a weak one cannot, so however much Wealth there is, it stays in sight but out of reach. Our engine sorts charts into the wealth profiles below by strength, the weight of Wealth and the weight of Peers.

The last column deserves a second look. For heavy-Wealth, weak-Day-Master charts, Wealth is never favorable; for Peers-rob-Wealth charts, Wealth is favorable about eight times in ten. In the first case there is too much Wealth and too little self, so the self needs building up first. In the second, Wealth is a good thing that gets shared out, so the point is keeping it. Both look like "bad money luck," but the causes are opposite, and so are the fixes. The genuinely strong-and-wealthy combination, able to carry what it has, is only about 3.5% of charts.

Question two: which road does money come by?

The Wealth star is the wealth itself. How money actually comes in depends on the other Ten Gods that produce and protect it. Our in-depth reading sorts income routes into six types:

"Output produces Wealth" is the most common: in about 46.7% of our sample, Output and Wealth both carry real weight, so this road is open. The in-depth reading tells you directly which route type is yours; for the lines of work each type suits, see BaZi and career.

Question three: when does it come?

The natal chart sets your relationship with money; luck pillars and annual pillars set the timing. A year whose stem or branch brings Wealth, an Output year that "produces" Wealth for a chart that already has it, and a narrow wealth vault being clashed open are all common signs of money on the move. But whether a Wealth year is good or bad depends on whether Wealth is favorable for you: for someone who favors Wealth it is an opening; for a heavy-Wealth, weak-Day-Master chart it is pressure. See when wealth comes.

Three common misunderstandings

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