The Golden Pig Month Is Here. It's Only Golden for Some of You.

The Month of the Golden Pig began this past weekend, and it's a really good month for wealth.

That's what you'll read. I read it myself. The Pig means abundance, the color is gold, the money is on its way.

It's a lovely thought. It also skips the only question that matters: good for whom?

I'm the Firepig. In over 40 years of this work, "When am I going to make money?" is one of the two questions people have asked me most. If the answer were "in November, everybody," I could have retired from this a long time ago. It doesn't work that way. A month doesn't hand out money to the whole world at once. It hands it to particular people, for a particular reason, and you can find out whether you're one of them.

What People Believe, and Why

I understand why the Golden Pig idea catches on. It has everything going for it.

In Chinese culture, the Pig does symbolize abundance. That part is real. And "golden" is a wonderful word to put next to money. So when an article says the month of the Golden Pig is a good month for wealth, nobody stops to argue. Who wants to argue with that?

I stopped for a different reason. When I saw "Golden Pig," my first thought was that a golden pig sounds like a Metal Pig. Gold is a metal, after all. But this isn't a Metal Pig. This is an Earth Pig, running from November 7 to December 7. The "gold" here means yellow, the color of earth.

So the word that makes this month sound like money is really just telling you the element. Earth. And once you know the element, you can stop guessing and start doing what astrologers actually do.

The gold in the Golden Pig isn't money. It's the color of dirt. What matters is who that dirt belongs to.

What's Actually True

When I want to know whether a time is lucky for somebody's money, I go to Ba Zi. It's the standard astrology used by the feng shui experts today, and it has an answer to this exact question.

In Ba Zi, the sign that tells the most about you isn't the animal of your birth year. It's your day sign, which is called your Day Master. Your Day Master has an element and an animal, just like every sign does. And the element of your day sign is the key to your wealth luck.

Here's the rule. Learn this one sentence and you'll know more than most of what gets published about lucky months:

You are in a good wealth period when your day element controls the element of the period you're looking at.

This month is an Earth month. Wood is the element that controls earth.

So the people with the best chance of making money this month, doing well at the job that produces their money, or doing well with an investment, are the people with a Wood Day Master. For them, this is the wealth month. The Golden Pig really is golden, and they should go to work.

If your Day Master is Fire, Earth, Metal or Water, this is not your wealth month. An article that tells you otherwise is being friendly, not accurate.

Why the Difference Matters

You could say, what's the harm? So a few extra people feel optimistic for a month.

Here's the harm. A word to the wise: people make money decisions on this kind of thing. If you take on something bigger than you should because a headline told you the month was golden, you've let a general forecast make a personal decision. And we're still in the Fire Horse year, a year that hardly needs any encouragement to take risks.

It also works the other way. If you have a Wood Day Master and you've been sitting on an idea, a raise you want to ask for, or an investment you've been studying, you've been reading about the wrong thing. You don't need a lucky month for everybody. You need your month, and this is it.

Now, I'm not telling you that a Wood Day Master is going to win the lottery in November. You always have to look at many things. That's the whole point of my book, The Mahjong Mirror: you need more than one perspective before you trust what you're seeing. Your month sign has to be in harmony with this month's sign. Your year sign has to be in harmony with the year's sign. For a super big stroke of luck, all of those factors have to come into play at once. But as shorthand, as the first thing to check? Your Day Master is where I start.

The Pig Still Has Something for You

I don't want to leave the Pig sounding like a fraud. It isn't one.

The Pig does stand for abundance. If your factors are aligned and you're in harmony with the Pig (the Rabbit, for example, or the Cat if you're Vietnamese), this is likely to be a good month for you too. It's not as promising as if this were your wealth month. But a lot of signs will do well in the Pig month, for money and even for love and romance.

So there are really two different kinds of good news this month, and it helps to know which one is yours. The Wood Day Masters have the wealth month. The people in harmony with the Pig have a generally kind month. Everybody else has a month, and it's worth knowing that before you spend like it's golden.

What to Do Before December 7

Find out your Day Master. You can't use this rule without it, and your birth year won't tell you. If you know your date of birth, a free Four Pillars calculator will show you your day sign, and the element is right there in it.

If you're Wood, use this month. Don't wait for the announcement.

If you're not, don't feel left out. Your wealth period is coming, and it isn't a mystery when. On Wednesday I'll walk you through how to time it yourself, for any element, down to the year, the month, the day and even the hour.

The Golden Pig is golden for some of you. The trick is knowing before you start spending.

If you'd like me to look at the whole picture, your Day Master and everything around it, that's what a personal reading is for. I'll tell you plainly what I see.

Book a reading with Bill

And if you want to understand why one perspective is never enough, it's all in The Mahjong Mirror.