Feng shui and money

What this book actually teaches

Eric Shaffert's argument is that the physical environment — the arrangement, flow, and energy of spaces where money is earned, managed, and stored — directly affects financial outcomes. Feng Shui and Money applies traditional Chinese feng shui principles to personal and business finances, treating the home office, desk placement, wallet, and entryway as variables in a system that can be optimized to attract wealth and remove energetic blocks to prosperity.

The book proceeds through the basic vocabulary of feng shui as applied to financial contexts. The bagua map — the nine-zone grid that feng shui practitioners overlay on a floor plan to identify areas corresponding to different life domains — is used to locate the "wealth corner" of a home or office, typically the far-left rear of a space as seen from the entrance. Shaffert provides guidance on activating and clearing that sector: removing clutter, adding symbolic objects (water features, plants with rounded leaves, purple and green colors), and eliminating items he associates with stagnant or draining energy. Desk placement is addressed at length — the "command position" facing the door, with a solid wall behind, is presented as the configuration that maximizes focus and financial clarity. The book also addresses the wallet (leather, organized, not overstuffed), the entryway (clear, welcoming, unobstructed), and the kitchen (associated in feng shui theory with wealth and nourishment).

The intended application is direct home or office rearrangement. The book is practical in format — it tells you what to move, what to buy, and what to throw away — rather than philosophical or scholarly.

The weaknesses are categorical rather than marginal. Feng shui is a traditional Chinese cultural and aesthetic practice, not a financial system, and the causal claims here — that spatial arrangement affects income or wealth accumulation — have no empirical support in any peer-reviewed research tradition. A reader who moves their desk to the command position and activates their wealth corner will not find that the book's financial claims hold up to external verification. The organizing and decluttering advice has independent merit (clutter impairs focus; organized financial documents reduce errors), but that merit is not unique to feng shui as a system. The 2008 publication date is not the issue — these claims were not empirically supported in 2008 either.

Worth considering only if the reader finds spatial ritual and symbolic environment-setting useful as a psychological anchor for financial intention-setting — not as a financial strategy in any direct sense.

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About Eric Shaffert

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