Monopoly: How Playing Monopoly Can Make You Rich?

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Foreword

How often do you play Monopoly? Do you know there is a lot for us to learn when playing Monopoly? Do you know what we learn from playing Monopoly can help us to become rich? In this article, I will walk you through those things that I have learned from playing Monopoly.

What is Monopoly?

Monopoly is a multi-player economics-themed board game. In the game, players roll two dices to move around the map, buying and trading lands (Or Title deed, a much formal name). 

How to play Monopoly? 🎮

To play the game Monopoly, players are to roll the dices and move around the game board, buy properties, build their house and wait until other players step on their land to pay the rent. The rent varies in different places, but in general, the closer the land to the GO (starting point), the lower the rent is. Meanwhile, the cost of building a house also varies the same as how the rent of each land did. The game ends when everyone except the winner is broke.

Characters
Player 1️⃣
Player 2️⃣
Player 3️⃣ (If applicable)
Player 4️⃣ (if applicable)
Bank 🏦 (One of the players will do the banker)

Income Source 💵

Whenever players pass the starting point GO, they can collect $200 from the bank. Other than that, players could also collect the rent from another player when another player steps on the land that they owned. Besides, players may also collect dollars when they get a good card from the Chance or Public Welfare deck.

Income Source	Active/Passive/Luck
$200 when passing GO🚩	Active 👷🏻
Receiving rent 💰 from other players	Passive 🍷
Get good cards from the Chance/Public Welfare deck	Luck 🤞🏻

Building house 🏠

If players want to construct a house on one of their lands, they are to collect all the title deeds with the same color. And if they would like to build another house in the same place, they are to first buy a house(s) for their land(s) (same color). 

Special Things ✨

Apart from stepping on lands, players could also step on some special grids that give them something good or bad. For instance, Chance, Public Welfare, Police Station, Jail, Free Parking, Income tax, and luxury tax.

Grid	What to do?
Chance ✨	Get a card from the Chance deck and follow the instruction provided in the card
Public Welfare 🏢	Get a card from the Public Welfare deck and follow the instruction provided in the card.
Police Station👮🏻‍♀️	Go to Jail Immediately.
*Jail 🚨	Just visiting or stay in jail.
Free Parking 🚗	Nothing happens (Or other game rules for free parking)
Income tax 💰	Pay $200 or 10% of their **total worth to the bank
Luxury tax 💎	Pay $75 to the bank

*To get out of the jail, you could pay $50 fine to the bank before you roll the dices, using “GET OUT OF JAIL FREE” card (Chance/public welfare) or rolling doubles. 

** Total worth includes all your cash on hand, printed price of mortgaged and unmortgaged properties and cost price of all building owned.

Lessons learn from playing Monopoly

i. How to get rich 🤑

Whenever we pass the starting point of the game, we get $200 from the bank. It is the biggest funding source for players when the game is just started. Players rely heavily on this funding source when they have nothing but cash. However, when in the middle of the game, everything changes. The funding source of players turns from the $200 collected when passing the GO to the rent of lands.

Active/Passive?	Monopoly	Real World
Active	$200 collected when passing the GO	Paycheque
Passive	Receiving rent from other players	Passive income

If you are good at playing Monopoly, you must acquire that the only way to win the game is to buy as many properties as possible for getting the rent that others pay you. Build houses, wait for someone to step on your properties, and pay you expensive rent. You never wait for the paycheque in the middle of or in late games.

The way we play Monopoly is applicable in our world. If you want to become rich in the real world, all you need to do is buy properties (or assets), things that can generate passive income for you. Purchase as much as possible to grow your net worth. 

Steps	What to do?
1️⃣	Earn active income by working
2️⃣	Purchase Assets to earn passive income
3️⃣	Repeat until passive income > active income
4️⃣	Stop earning income actively and focus on earning more passive income.

Talking about assets, do you know what an asset is? In the financial world, an asset is a resource with economic value that can generate cash flow. In simpler words, an asset is something that makes you money. Everything that doesn’t make you money does not count as an asset. Don’t ask me whether your iPhone is an asset or not. Don’t ask me whether your hot toys are an asset or not. As long as they can’t earn you money, they aren’t assets.

Apart from buying assets, another thing we should be aware of is our daily expenses and liability. When playing the game Monopoly, there is nothing we need to do for “living” in the game. However, in the real world, we need to pay for our utility bills, food… So, when we are trying to become rich in the real world, different from the game Monopoly, we are to count those bills in. Cut down all expenses that could be avoided, such as buying doodads or something else that makes you pay but never earns you money. 

ii. Do not count on things take potluck🤞🏻

In the game Monopoly, players can make a fortune when they step on the grid, Free Parking (one of the ways to play is to get all fines paid by all players when stepping on free parking), or get good cards from the chance or public welfare deck. However, it doesn’t work in real life. You can never get such opportunities. 

Sometimes, you may probably hear successful people say they succeed since they were lucky. The matter of luck does contribute to one’s success. It fast-forwards one’s road to success. However, if you are spinning your wheels and do nothing to grow your business or develop yourself, you will never succeed no matter how lucky you are, as you are unable to seize those opportunities in front of you. 

As Albert Einstein has said, “Insanity is doing something same as usual and expecting it come out with another result.”. If you want to change your situation (if it is bad), you need to make changes. Don’t just sit there and wait until something happens. Hope and pray are not the strategy to get rid of painfulness. Get out of your comfort zone and do what you should do now. Go study, learn, and do something valuable. Invest in yourself with time and money.

Hope and pray are never the strategy to get rid of painfulness

Gordon Chan

iii. Opportunity cost

Another thing I learn from playing Monopoly is opportunity cost. The money we received at the beginning of the game is the same. However, the way we use it varies. And it leads to different results, whether we win the game or go broke. The reason differing winners from losers is how they use their money. Or, in other words, how they calculate their opportunity cost. 

In case you don’t know, opportunity cost is the potential benefit an individual, investor, or business missed out on when choosing one alternative over another, which contains the highest value among those other options. In simpler words, opportunity cost is what you give up for selecting a choice. For instance, you are free on the weekend. And you are thinking about how to spend your time. There are two choices for you. One is to do a part-time job to earn $50, another is to watch a movie (cost $ 10). In such cases, the opportunity cost of you going out to watch a movie equals $50(implicit cost)+$10(explicit cost) = $60, as you give up the chance to earn $50 and use $10. More, the time cost is also calculated in opportunity cost. However, I am not going to include it here.

Back to the game Monopoly, people who think about the outcome tend to win the game easier than people who just do what they want without deliberating the result of their action. This is the same when playing the game “Life”. Every decision we make could either contribute to or devastate our way to success. This is what we call The Compound Effect — each decision you make, even they are small, would affect the outcome. Keep in mind to use your time and money wisely. Calculate each opportunity cost of your decision and make quality trades. 

Success is the sum of small efforts, repeatedly day-in and day-out.

Robert Collier

Comparison of the Monopoly and the real world

To be honest, if talking about financial education to kids, teenagers, or even adults, Monopoly is a well-designed game that teaches people how to become rich. However, a game is still a game. There is still something that the Monopoly cannot teach or reflect how they work in the real world.

Here are the things that the Monopoly doesn’t included.

	Monopoly🧳	Life 📷
1️⃣ Starting Capital	Same Amount	Different
2️⃣ Background	Same	Different
3️⃣ Active income	Same ($200 💵)	Different
4️⃣ Daily Expense	NO ❌	YES ✅
5️⃣ Get in Jail	Frequently 🚔	Almost never 🙅🏻‍♂️
6️⃣ Process of Land Purchasing	Easy & Fast 🚀	Troublesome & Takes time 🐌
7️⃣ Process of House building	Easy & Fast 🚀	Troublesome & Takes time 🐌
8️⃣ Cashing out by selling houses	No Lost & Fast 🚀	Have Lost & Slow 🐌
9️⃣ Building houses	No Risk ❌	Have Risk 📉
1️⃣0️⃣ Anyone disturbing the game?	None ❌	Government | Authorities 🏢
1️⃣1️⃣ Frequency of paying tax?	Depends on luck 🤞🏻	Regularly 🛄
1️⃣2️⃣ Tax category	2️⃣ types	A Lot Ⓜ️
1️⃣3️⃣ Price of land and houses	Never Change ❌	Change Rapidly ✅
1️⃣4️⃣ Borrowing money from institution	NO ❌	YES ✅
1️⃣5️⃣ New things appears?	NO ❌	YES ✅

Final Thought

Monopoly is a great game for learning financial education. Although it may not reflect how things work in the real world, it still teaches us a lot when playing it. Hope you find this article inspiring, and remember to think twice when you are making your decisions in the game Monopoly or in your life.

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