The Seven Destroyers of Wealth: How to Become Financially Indestructible

Every entrepreneur has a version of this story: the leap off the safe path, the savings account that hits zero, the years spent rebuilding. Michael Santonado has lived it twice — once as the seven-figure net worth he built, and once as the seven-figure net worth he lost. What he brought back from both trips is this episode's real subject: not a stock pick, but a system built to survive the shocks that eventually hit everyone.

Raised at the Dinner Table, Then Thrown Off the Cliff

Michael's financial education started early and by accident — his parents were bank managers who met at work, retired at 55 in the era when that was still possible, and talked openly about stocks, mortgages, debt, and taxes over dinner. It gave him a foundation most people never get. It also gave him a wiring for safety that took years to unlearn.

At 25, deep in personal development, he walked away from the secure corporate path with no sales experience, no marketing knowledge, and no plan — and burned through what would be half a million dollars today chasing business ideas that didn't work. One of them: importing cordyceps, a rare Himalayan superfood worth more per ounce than gold, into a market that wasn't ready to pay for it. It died as an idea before it ever became a business.

Then came a matchmaking company in Toronto with an 85% success rate — real people, real marriages, real kids now walking around because of it. Michael met his ex-wife through his own business. She came with two kids from a previous marriage who'd lost their father with no life insurance in place — a financial gap that became the reason Michael pivoted from matchmaking into financial advising in the first place. Every day, he'd ask the kids what they'd learned about money in school. The answer was always nothing. "It hit me like a ton of bricks," he says. "It's got to be you."

He rebuilt. Then COVID hit, the marriage ended, a chunk of the money went to a divorce, more of it went to an investment manager who lost the rest. Riddled with failures and successes, at 41, still standing.

The Seven Destroyers of Wealth

The core of Michael's framework is a list worth keeping on a wall somewhere:

1. Inflation — the real number is closer to 20% than the 2-8% headline figure.
2. Taxation — 25-50% depending on where you live, and most people are overpaying because their accountant just files instead of optimizing.
3. Unexpected death — no life insurance in the family means someone else foots the funeral costs and the tax bill.
4. Unexpected illness — Michael himself lost three months of income to a health issue mid-business, draining savings to cover bills and staff.
5. Unexpected disability — when you're the business, your ability to work is the income.
6. Lack of financial discipline — the expensive habit that quietly bleeds money every month.
7. Litigation and creditors — running rental properties or a farm business under your personal name instead of a proper corporate structure means one tenant accident or injury claim exposes everything you own.

That last one isn't theoretical. Michael describes clients with ten properties, or a working farm, all held personally — one lawsuit away from losing everything, for the cost of an incorporation they never got around to.

Becoming Indestructible Isn't Complicated — It's Just Undone

The fix, in Michael's telling, isn't exotic. It's a mindset: handle it now. Incorporate. Get the will done. Buy the insurance policy you can actually afford, even if it's $1 million instead of $5 million. Pay yourself first — every paycheck, something goes to savings, investments, retirement accounts, before anything else touches it.

"Successful people are too busy doing what other people are still talking about," he says. "One day I'll start the business. One day I'll write the book." The people actually building wealth aren't smarter — they've simply stopped deferring the decisions that protect what they're building.

Money Is Just an Exchange — So Is Time

One of the sharper threads in the conversation: money exists to make trading value for value easier than bartering cows for chickens. Once you see it that way, everything you spend is really an exchange — coffee for money is a terrible way to retain value; Bitcoin, real estate, or a properly structured business are exchanges built to hold or grow it.

The same logic applies to the one asset everyone starts with before they have any money at all: time. Eight hours at $17/hour is one exchange. Twelve hours a day building something with a much higher expected return — at the cost of not getting paid today — is another. Neither is wrong. But knowing which one you're actually making, on purpose, is the whole game.

Talk About Money Like It's the Weather

Michael's chapter one, literally: to talk about money, or not to talk about money. He tells a story of a girlfriend who sat, stunned, while his family casually discussed mortgage rates and cash flow over lunch like it was small talk — because in his house, it was. That casualness isn't luck. It's the same "handle it now" mindset applied to the conversation itself: what you talk about, you bring about. Silence around money isn't neutral — it's the first destroyer taking root.

The Takeaway

None of the seven destroyers require bad luck to find you — they require inaction. A will undone, an insurance policy never bought, a business never incorporated, a conversation never had. The wealthy aren't people without problems, Michael's genuinely useful reframe. They're people who've already handled the problems everyone else is still deferring.

Find Michael Santonado's books, coaching, and consulting at michaelsantonado.com.

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