10 Hidden Games the System Uses to Keep You Poor
Most people don't realise it, but they are playing a game they never agreed to play.
They wake up and rush from one place to another. If they're lucky, they've got a job to go to.
Then, they pay their bills and taxes every single month.
They scroll through their phones up and down, go to bed, wake up the next day, and repeat the same things over and over again.
What if I told you that this is a game that was designed for you to play, but never ever to win? 🤔
You see, for this game to continue being played, it needs certain players in the game.
And that's where you and I come into the picture.
It needs the consumers, workers and taxpayers.
But this game has a game designer and a game owner.
The people who own the game and design the game are the big companies, the media, the people who run the country, and the people who are unseen in the picture.
What exactly is this game that we are all playing?
And how could we get out of this game if we wanted to get out of it or stop playing the game?
You see, the one thing that connects the players of the game to the owners and designers of the game is money.
And the way that this manifests in our lives day to day is it shows up as fear. You might have:
- Fear of more taxes rising.
- Fear of missing out in life or being left behind.
- Fear of high inflation and the cost of living rising, and potentially being unsustainable.
- Fear that other people might be taking your job or jobs.
- Fear of AI potentially taking your job.
- Fear of being controlled by digital IDs, for example.
- Fear that you are running out of time as you age, and you can't sustain yourself as you head towards your future retirement one day.
- Fear, generally speaking, that you are so deep in this game that you are paralysed and can't do anything at all.
The thing I've learned about this game, having studied this game and played the game, is that winning every match in the game is not how you win the game.
The only way to win the game is actually if you don't play the game at all.
If you really think about it, when we stop paying, because everything is so connected to money, we actually stop playing this game.
I've decided to write this post today because we've noticed a lot that's going on in the lives of our friends, family members, followers, and community members. When we meet people in person, they echo the same messaging.
By the end of this post, you will know exactly what that game looks like, and you'll know how to play that game better or how to stop playing that game.
My name is Ken of The Humble Penny and Financial Joy Academy, I’m a Chartered Accountant, Former Chief Financial Officer and Financial Coach.
👉🏽Together with my wife Mary, we’re Sunday Times Bestselling Authors of Financial Joy, and we recently announced our new book, The Wealth Habit, which is all about the small changes that will make you rich.
The Wealth Habit is a groundbreaking, behaviour-driven approach to wealth-building that rewires the way you think about money, turning financial success into a series of tiny, effortless, repeatable actions.
Thank you to everyone who has ordered a copy so far! It really means a lot to us.
And good news, we agreed to an Italian translation for The Wealth Habit (rare pre-publication), and we expect more language translations the more you guys support us by ordering and gifting copies.
📍 So please order your copy of The Wealth Habit here.
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Let’s dive straight in!
I'll walk through each of the ten games, explain how the system benefits from it, give real-life examples, and provide practical steps you can take right now to begin breaking free.
Game 1 – The Housing Game: Bigger House = Success (But What Does Freedom Cost?)
The housing game runs on a simple cultural message: a bigger house equals success.
The system pushes credit, long mortgages and rising property prices so households feel compelled to stretch themselves into homes they can't truly afford.
The result? People trapped in high monthly payments, working decades longer than they otherwise would, with little time or financial flexibility.
Think of a couple who takes a 35-year mortgage on a house worth £700,000 and pays £3,000 a month before bills.
That level of fixed cost makes saving difficult, reduces options and ties them to the job they have simply to avoid defaulting.
The bank legally owns the house until the mortgage is repaid and you are effectively renting happiness from a financial institution for decades.
I remember meeting a young millennial couple on a TV show we filmed in Cornwall.
They were so burdened by debt that they chose another path: they rented a parcel of land surrounded by nature and built a modest, off-grid home from local materials (see pic below).
In addition, they planted food, sourced essentials locally and worked hard to clear non-mortgage debts.
They traded perceived status for real freedom. It wasn't glamorous, but it was real, sustainable and theirs.
Mary and I made a decision early on to own our home outright as quickly as possible.
We paid our mortgage off in 7 years with much sacrifice, while also investing.
That choice changed everything, and it bought time, reduced anxiety and freed up money to invest more in the stock market.
How to stop playing (or play differently)
- Buy a house that supports your goals, not your image. If your mortgage steals your freedom, it isn't an asset, it's a shackle.
- Make your home an income generator: rent a room, create a workspace to lease, or host short-term stays where appropriate.
- Think small and strategic: a smaller mortgage gives you optionality to invest, switch careers or start a business.
- Run the true numbers: account for tax, repairs, insurance and opportunity cost. If a £500 monthly mortgage increase prevents you from investing £500 monthly into an index fund, compare the long-term outcomes.
- Consider alternatives: renting, co-housing, house hacking or paying down high-interest debt before upgrading your living standard.
Recommended: Pay Off Mortgage Early or Invest?
Game 2 – The Tax Game: Employees Pay Upfront, Owners Pay Later
One of the clearest structural advantages in the system is taxation rules and the way they're applied.
Employees have tax taken at source i.e. money is removed before they ever touch it.
Business owners and investors, on the other hand, often pay tax after applying legitimate deductions, allowances and reinvestments.
Combine this with powerful firms that can minimise their taxes with teams of accountants, and you get a system that extracts more from everyday workers.
There is also the harsh reality that the more you earn in a traditional job, the more benefits and tax-free allowances you risk losing and the more complexity you face.
For example, I often see this – someone who gets promoted and now earns £110k.
They're working more hours with more responsibility but the promotion also pushes them into higher tax brackets (effective 60%) and reduces their tax-free personal allowances and even childcare benefits.
The net effect is more money out of your pocket and less time for yourself.
How to stop playing (or play smarter)
- Learn the tax rules: ignorance costs money. Know what reliefs and allowances exist in your country (for example, ISA or pension allowances in the UK) and use them.
- Start a side hustle: legitimate business expenses reduce taxable profit and teach you to treat income differently.
- Use tax-efficient vehicles: pensions, ISAs, tax-free allowances and salary sacrifice schemes where available.
- Claim what’s legitimate: track business-related costs, and if needed, consult a qualified accountant for tax planning — it often pays for itself.
- Think long-term: invest using tax wrappers; slightly lower tax now can compound into significantly more freedom later.
Recommended: Book a 121 Power Hour Financial Coaching session with me
Game 3 – The Ego Game: Spending to Impress
The ego game is deceptively simple: you buy things to project success.
Lease a car that costs £700 per month to look successful.
Upgrade your wardrobe to match the latest online image.
Buy the fancy coffees, and it becomes part of your identity.
But this showmanship comes with a cost — the small ongoing drains and the psychological need to maintain the image.
I was recently at the shopping mall to buy a gift for my son's birthday.
We drive a modest car we've owned for over nine years so far.
While parked, I noticed people in expensive cars that, in truth, were likely draining their ability to save and build wealth.
When you look past the shiny exterior, what is the true life cost — lost years of freedom, extra working hours, stress?
How to stop playing
- Choose substance over show. Spend for purpose, not praise.
- Calculate the true cost of status purchases: depreciation, insurance, fuel, maintenance and the opportunity cost of what that money could have earned invested.
- Practice a cooling-off period on big buys. Wait 30 days and see if the desire persists.
- Adopt a “value-first” spending rule: does this purchase buy me time, peace, health or growth? If not, it's not worth the trade-off.
Game 4 – The Career Game: Pay Rises That Trap You
The career game trains us to believe promotions will lead to freedom.
Yet every promotion often brings higher taxes, creeping expenses and less time.
I've seen it many times: a promotion that raises a salary from £70k to £120k, followed by an upgraded car, a bigger home and then the shock of losing personal allowances once thresholds are crossed.
The result is paradoxical — you earn more but feel poorer.
This is lifestyle creep coupled with policy quirks. The company gets more productive labour; the system gets more taxes and more consumption. You get less control.
How to stop playing
- Use your job to fund freedom, not a fancier lifestyle. Put pay rises straight into investments or debt repayment rather than into new recurring spending.
- Automate saving: set up direct debits that “pay you first” into savings and investments before you see the money in your main account.
- Build income streams outside your job: investments, rental income (if done tax efficiently), digital products or side businesses, and reduce reliance on salary hours.
- Keep expenses flat even as income rises — maintain your standard of living while redirecting the marginal income to long-term security.
Game 5 – The Data Game: Your Attention and Clicks Are Currency
Every click, search and “Accept cookies” is a tiny transaction where you trade information for convenience.
That data gets processed and sold.
Advertisers and platforms know what you searched for and will show you offers to spend.
Devices in your home listen and observe patterns that are eventually monetised.
That surplus information is used to encourage spending and consumption that benefits companies, not you.
Search once for a holiday, and for weeks, your feed is full of flight deals.
Say the word “exercise” near a smart speaker and you’ll be served fitness ads. This is not magic; it’s a business model.
How to stop playing
- Turn devices off or put them on airplane mode when you need privacy.
- Limit app permissions and tracking on your phone; delete or restrict apps that listen or collect excessive data.
- Use privacy tools: privacy-focused browsers, ad blockers and consider a VPN when on private or public Wi‑Fi.
- Keep certain conversations out of listening range of smart devices. If a device doesn’t need listening features, disable them.
- Create offline time — walks, hobbies, reading physical books, and reduce digital exposure that prompts unnecessary spending.
Game 6 – The Social Media Game: You Are the Product
Social platforms are designed to keep you scrolling. The attention economy turns time into ad revenue.
When you spend hours consuming curated lives, your perspective narrows into comparison and distraction.
Take “Emma” – she spends two hours a day scrolling TikTok. That’s roughly 730 hours a year — more than 30 days a year of wakeful time — lost to feeds designed to keep her coming back.
What could a whole month per year of purposeful work or rest do for your financial and emotional life?
Worse, many of the things you see are carefully selected to trigger spending, insecurity or envy.
The platforms win when you stay, advertisers win when you buy, and your long-term projects lose attention.
How to stop playing
- Limit scrolling to specific times: set a daily cap (e.g. 20–30 minutes) and stick to it.
- Be deliberate about who you follow. Prioritise creators who teach, challenge or uplift rather than those who only entertain or provoke.
- Create more than you consume. Use the time you reclaim to build skills, write, craft a side business or invest in relationships.
- Batch social media checking: pick two or three short windows for checking rather than continuous browsing.
- Try a digital Sabbath: a full day or weekend offline to reset attention and perspective.
Game 7 – The Consumption Game: Small Leaks Sink Big Boats
We often think the problem is the big purchases: the house, the car, the holiday.
But the real daily drain is the small, emotionally charged purchases e.g. the takeaways, coffees, impulse buys, that quietly erode your ability to save.
A friend once told me they spend up to £1,500 a month on takeaways alone.
That’s roughly £18,000 a year — money that could have been invested to build future optionality.
Or consider a modest £250 per month leak on miscellaneous treats. That’s £3,000 a year.
Reinvested with a simple a system, these amounts compound and grow.
The point: small, frequent spending often keeps people in a paycheck-to-paycheck loop while giving them temporary emotional boosts.
How to stop playing
- Pay yourself first: automate transfers to savings or investments as soon as you get paid.
- Practice a pause: ask “will this matter in 30 days?” before buying.
- Track and categorise every expense for a month. You’ll be surprised how leaks add up.
- Create replacement rituals for emotional spending: a walk, a call to a friend, or a 24-hour wait before ordering.
- Use rules like the 30-day rule for non-essential purchases and a monthly treat budget so small pleasures don’t derail long-term goals.
Game 8 – The Time-for-Money Game: You’re Trained to Trade Hours for Pounds
We’ve been conditioned to exchange time for money.
If you don’t work, you don’t earn.
That’s a brittle model — illnesses, job loss or simple ageing can abruptly cut earning capacity.
Sarah, who works long pharmacy shifts, knows the pain: when she’s off sick, her income drops to zero.
That fragility is built into the system to keep people needing steady paycheques.
The alternative is to build income that doesn’t require your constant presence: leverage, capital, and systems that work independently of your direct hours.
How to stop playing
- Create assets that earn while you sleep: investments, rental income, digital products or intellectual property.
- Build leveraged businesses: hire people, automate processes and use technology so you can scale without adding hours.
- Convert skills into products: write an eBook, create a course, build templates or sell a service that can be packaged.
- Use your job as a platform to invest in passive income streams — don’t treat salary as the only answer.
Recommended: Join The Free Rocket Your Income Challenge. The next one starts on 5th January 2026. Click the link for future dates.
Game 9 – The Identity Game: Chasing an Image Is Exhausting
Society encourages us to chase identities: the senior title on LinkedIn, the aspirational car, the curated Insta feed.
That pursuit of external validation becomes exhausting and attaches your self-worth to things that are transitory. When your sense of success depends on what others think, you spend more energy proving it than living it.
There’s a deep freedom in detaching your worth from external markers.
Quiet building e.g. working on your values, progress and peace without broadcasting every step, is a radical act.
How to stop playing
- Detach self-worth from external signs. Practice internal metrics: peace, progress and purpose.
- Build quietly. You don’t need applause to make meaningful progress. Let results speak later.
- Limit public comparison: unfollow accounts that make you feel inadequate and spend more time with real people who know you personally.
- Journal on values. When a potential decision conflicts with your stated values, pause and reassess.
Game 10 – The Information Game: Noise Is Control
The media landscape is designed to grab your attention with constant updates, outrage and breaking news.
This creates perpetual anxiety and a sense of urgency that’s profitable for broadcasters and platforms.
The news cycle exists hourly because repeated exposure keeps you hooked. But constant news consumption rarely makes you better off — it often makes you more fearful and less focused.
Take Ben as an example: he starts his day scrolling headlines and ends it anxious but no wiser.
The buffet of information is tempting, but stuffing yourself on the hottest takes leaves you distracted and depleted.
How to stop playing
- Limit news intake. Decide specific times to check the news rather than constant updates.
- Read long-form books and long-term perspectives rather than headline-driven snippets.
- Follow credible, calm thinkers who focus on long-term planning rather than breaking scandal-driven stories.
- Focus on what you can control: your habits, your savings rate, your skill growth and your relationships.
- Create an information diet: set daily limits for short-form content and dedicate deliberate time for deep reading and learning.
Putting it all together: a practical 10-step checklist to start winning
Understanding the games is only half the battle.
The other half is building a quiet system of habits that slowly shift the balance of power back to you.
Here is a simple checklist – one item for each game – that you can use to begin changing your trajectory:
- Housing: Run the true numbers for your home and identify one way to make it an asset (rent a room, workspace or pay down high-interest debt).
- Tax: Set up a tax-friendly savings plan: max out pension/ISA/retirement allowances where available, and book a consultation with an accountant.
- Ego: List three status purchases you’ll pause for 30 days and revisit before buying.
- Career: On your next raise, automatically allocate a fixed percentage into investments or debt reduction.
- Data: Audit your devices and revoke permissions for three apps that don’t need location or microphone access.
- Social Media: Set a daily screen-time limit and pick two creators who add real value to follow.
- Consumption: Track all discretionary spending for one month and identify leaks you can cut to save £100–£300 or $300–$500 per month.
- Time-for-money: Create one passive income experiment (an eBook, online course, rentable room or small investment plan) and schedule time weekly to build it.
- Identity: Write down three values that actually matter to you and one small way to reflect them in daily life.
- Information: Designate at most two news-check windows per day and commit the rest of your time to reading books or long-form learning.
Why this matters: the difference between playing and choosing
Every one of these games is structured to enrich the designers i.e. corporations, media companies, lenders and the unseen algorithms that profit when you participate.
If you keep playing by their rules, you’ll likely end up working longer, paying more, and having less freedom. But the truth is simple: if you stop paying, whether literally by reducing consumption or metaphorically by withholding attention, time and emotional energy, you stop playing.
Winning the game isn’t about tricking the system. It’s about refusing to be played.
You do that by understanding the rules, creating a deliberate financial and psychological system that supports your long-term goals, and quietly building assets that buy you time and peace.
I want to leave you with a line I often say: the only way to truly win this game is not to play it.
It requires clarity, focus and small daily choices that compound into enormous freedom.
Choose one of the ten games above and start there. Revisit this article in 30 days, and you'll be surprised by how far consistent small actions can take you.
Final thoughts
We live in a cleverly designed world.
It offers convenience and promise while quietly extracting time, attention and money from those who don't see the patterns.
When you understand the mechanisms — from mortgages and taxes to data tracking and identity chasing — the choices that lead to peace and financial independence become clearer.
Becoming financially independent doesn't happen overnight.
It is built slowly: a paid-off mortgage here, a monthly investment there, a side hustle that grows quietly over the years.
Build quietly. Protect your attention. Pay yourself first. Choose peace, progress and purpose over performance.
If you take nothing else away from this piece, hold this: the system rewards those who design it. Your job, when you're ready, is to design a life that rewards you.
More resources to help you build sustainable wealth and stay ahead of the negative systems of this world:
- Book a 121 Power Hour Financial Coaching session with me
- Read Financial Joy (a 10-week plan we call The “RESET”) and also The Wealth Habit (The mindset and habit “SYSTEM” to beat the system)
- Join our global learning platform and community of like-minded people at Financial Joy Academy
Over to you – Which one of these 10 games are you currently playing and want to stop? What other games have I missed out on in our list? Comment below and share.
Watch the video version about the 10 Hidden Games the System Uses to Keep You Poor:
As always, in all things, be thankful and seek joy.
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