Introduction
Ten years before it happened, Dr Nicholas Michels says he would have called himself crazy for even considering it. Offered $8.1 million to move his financial advisory practice to another firm, he turned it down. Not because the money was not real, but because he had started noticing cracks in an industry he had spent two decades building a career inside, cracks that would have meant profiting at the expense of the very clients who trusted him.
Michels' path there began with his parents' divorce at ten years old, when his family went from comfortable to genuinely poor almost overnight, and a teenage job at a golf course where the owner taught him about compound interest for five dollars an hour. What emerged is a philosophy he now writes and speaks about under the banner Rich by Choice: the idea that wealth, properly understood, is a decision you make daily, not a number you eventually reach.
From comfortable to poor overnight
Nicholas describes a childhood he did not fully understand the privilege of until it was gone. His father was an entrepreneur running several businesses, his mother a stay-at-home parent, and at ten years old he genuinely did not know what money was because the family had never wanted for anything. His mother sitting on his bed to tell him his parents were divorcing shattered that comfort instantly. She became a single mother of four working three jobs to survive, and the family moved from a comfortable home into a mobile home.
The golf course owner who taught him compound interest
At sixteen, working for five dollars an hour washing golf carts, Nicholas met a golf course owner named Rex who, unusually for someone in that position, was still out on the tractor doing manual labour himself. Rex introduced him to the concept of compound interest through a simple game, showing him that putting aside even a small amount from every paycheck could grow into significant wealth by his mid-thirties. Nicholas describes it as a genuine light bulb moment: he did not have to be born rich to become wealthy, he simply had to be disciplined over time.
Outwardly successful, inwardly stressed
Nicholas coined a phrase for the gap he noticed early in his marriage, and later in many of his clients: outwardly successful, inwardly stressed. From the outside, his career as a financial adviser looked like unambiguous success. At home, he and his wife kept circling the same unresolved arguments about money without making real progress. The turning point came when his wife told him she wanted to know they were in it together, prompting him to realise they had never actually sat down and defined, in specific detail, the life they wanted to build.
Why he turned down $8.1 million
The decision to reject the $8.1 million offer came after Nicholas began noticing what he calls corporate greed within parts of the financial services industry, crystallised by a story an older colleague told him: a manager once said there are three parties in every financial relationship, the firm, the adviser, and the client, and only two of them need to make money. Nicholas realised that accepting the offer would have meant the receiving firm recouping its investment at his own clients' expense. He and his wife made the decision together, and he describes never once looking back.
The vision statement exercise that changed his marriage
A coach once had Nicholas complete a detailed vision statement exercise, imagining himself at 110 years old looking back on his life and identifying, specifically, what needed to be true for him to consider it a life well lived. He and his wife did the exercise together, mapping out concrete details rather than vague goals like "retire comfortably", and says that specificity, done jointly, was what finally got them working from the same page rather than repeating the same argument.
Communication as the fix for generational wealth failure
Nicholas cites data suggesting that seventy percent of inherited wealth is gone within the first generation, and ninety-five percent by the second. His view is that this failure comes down overwhelmingly to two solvable problems: a lack of financial education, and a lack of empowerment, meaning parents rarely have detailed, ongoing conversations with their children about money, values and the habits that built the family's wealth in the first place. He argues this applies at every scale, not just to families with significant assets, because passing on values and habits matters as much as passing on money itself.
What he had to unlearn
Asked directly what he has had to unlearn, Nicholas answers that control is an illusion. He describes learning to focus energy only on what he can actually influence, his own actions and decisions, while consciously letting go of the much larger set of things he cannot control, a distinction he ties directly to his Christian faith.
