You’re probably familiar with that hollow feeling on a Sunday night. You’ve worked sixty hours. Your LinkedIn looks like a highlight reel of "hustle culture" wins. Yet, you feel kind of bankrupt. Not in the "can't pay the rent" way, but in the "I don’t know my neighbors and my back hurts" way.
Honestly, most of us have been sold a lie. We’ve been told that wealth is a single number. A scoreboard with only one column: dollars.
Sahil Bloom, the guy who went from Stanford baseball and private equity to becoming one of the most influential voices in personal growth, realized this the hard way. He was "winning" at the money game but losing the war of life. He realized that if you have ten million dollars but zero people to grab a beer with—or you're too sick to leave the house—you aren't wealthy. You're just a person with a lot of money.
The Sahil Bloom 5 types of wealth framework is basically a re-education for your brain. It forces you to look at your life as a diversified portfolio. Because let's face it, if you put all your chips on one number and the wheel stops elsewhere, you're in trouble.
The Time Billionaire Reality Check
Time wealth is the first and, frankly, most brutal pillar. Bloom talks about being a "time billionaire." If you have 31 years left to live, you have about a billion seconds remaining. You’re rich! But here’s the kicker: unlike money, you can’t earn more of it.
You’ve probably heard the "15 times" realization he mentions. It’s the idea that by the time you graduate high school, you’ve already spent about 90% of the total time you’ll ever spend with your parents. If you only see them once a year now, and they live another 15 years, you only have 15 visits left. That hits like a ton of bricks.
Control is the currency of time wealth. It’s not about having a calendar with nothing on it. It’s about being the person who decides what goes on it. Are you a "time taker" or a "time maker"?
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Most people are busy but not productive. They’re "working" but actually just reacting to emails. Real time wealth means having the "discretionary time" to say yes to a spontaneous coffee with an old friend without checking if your boss will notice you’re offline.
Social Wealth: Your Front-Row People
Social wealth isn't about how many followers you have on Instagram or how many "connections" you’ve racked up on LinkedIn. That’s just noise. Social wealth is about the depth and breadth of your human connections.
Bloom splits this into a few layers. You’ve got your "Front-Row People." These are the folks who would sit in the front row at your funeral. They’re the ones you call at 2:00 AM when your car breaks down or your life is falling apart.
Then there’s breadth—your community. This is the guy at the local coffee shop who knows your name, or the group you play pickup basketball with.
A lot of people let their friendships atrophy. We get busy, we get married, we move, and suddenly we haven't talked to our best friend in six months. Sahil suggests a "Life Razor" here: never let a good friendship die from neglect. It's way easier to maintain a house than to rebuild one from the ground up after it collapses. Same goes for people.
Mental Wealth and the "Enough" Threshold
This is where things get a bit more internal. Mental wealth is about your clarity of purpose and your ability to stay curious. If you’re constantly anxious, even if you’re sitting on a private island, your mental wealth is zero.
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It’s about "Space."
Do you have time to think? Or is your brain just a series of browser tabs that never close? Bloom advocates for creating "solitude" through things like long walks or journaling. It sounds simple, almost too simple, but most people haven't sat in silence with their own thoughts for more than five minutes in years.
There’s also the concept of "Growth." If you aren't learning, you’re stagnating. Mental wealth is the hunger to remain a student of the world, even when you’re supposedly an expert.
Physical Wealth: The House You Live In
You’ve heard the cliché: a healthy person wants a thousand things, but a sick person only wants one.
Physical wealth is the foundation. If this one cracks, the other four don’t matter. You can't enjoy your "Time Wealth" if you're in a hospital bed. Bloom breaks this down into three simple (but not easy) buckets:
- Movement: Are you active daily? It doesn't mean running a marathon; it means not being sedentary.
- Nutrition: Are you eating things that actually fuel you or just things that taste good for ten seconds?
- Recovery: This is the one we all fail. Sleep is the ultimate performance enhancer, yet we treat it like an optional hobby.
One of his interviewees, an 80-year-old, told him to treat your body like a house you have to live in for another seventy years. If you knew you could never move, you’d probably take better care of the plumbing, right?
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Financial Wealth: The Default Scorecard
Finally, we get to the money. Sahil doesn't say money is useless. That would be naive. Money is an enabler. It’s a tool that buys you the other types of wealth.
The problem is the "Arrival Fallacy." We think, "Once I make $200k, I'll be happy." Then you get there, and you see someone making $500k, and suddenly $200k feels like poverty.
Bloom identifies five levels of financial wealth:
- Level 1: Survival. Your basic needs are met.
- Level 2: Comfort. You can go to a restaurant without sweating the bill.
- Level 3: Freedom. You can start investing and compounding.
- Level 4: Moderate Independence. Your passive income covers some of your life.
- Level 5: Complete Independence. You don't have to work ever again.
The trick is defining your "Enough." If you don't have a finish line, you're just running a race that never ends. You’ll keep sacrificing your time, your health, and your friends to get more of the one thing you already have enough of.
How to Actually Use This (Actionable Steps)
Stop trying to maximize one area. Start trying to optimize the whole portfolio.
- Conduct a Wealth Audit: Score yourself 1-10 on each of the five types. Be honest. If you’re a 10 in money but a 2 in physical, you aren't "winning." You're out of balance.
- Identify Your "Anti-Goals": What are you not willing to sacrifice? Maybe you want to be a CEO, but your anti-goal is "I will not miss my kid’s bedtime more than once a week."
- The Energy Audit: Look at your calendar for the last week. Mark every activity as "Energy-Creating" or "Energy-Draining." Try to cut the bottom 20% of the drainers next week.
- Define Your "Enough": Sit down and actually calculate the number you need to live your "ideal day." It’s usually a lot lower than you think.
- The 15-Visit Rule: Call your parents. Or your siblings. Or that friend you haven't seen in two years. Do it today.
Wealth is a living thing. It changes as you age. When you're 22, you might trade time for money. When you're 52, you'll desperately try to trade money back for time. The goal is to make sure that when you finally reach the end of the road, you’re not just holding a big check in an empty room.