Rex Mendoza of Ayala Land, who is on a mission to spread the gospel of making your money work for you, of literally back-whipping your currency until it contributes to your financial portfolio, dropped by the Inquirer to hold a seminar whose audience was made up of people whose miniscule cash savings—as he later explained magnificently—were idly sitting in banks.

I say idly sitting because Rex, in a manner that left me idiotically open-mouthed the way I always am when reading the business section or listening to business reporters talk, said that putting money in the bank is actually devaluing it without you noticing.

How that is, I’ll leave it to you to ask him. I cannot explain what I could hardly grasp in the first place.

Anyway, there was an interesting footnote to his seminar; one that spoke about the mentality that makes us different from the people who see loose change in amounts of millions, not centavos.

He said that the likes of Henry Sy, John Gokongwei and Danding Cojuangco can sit idly all day for the rest of their lives and yet, they do not have to worry about anything financially.

No, let me rephrase that.

They can sit idly all day and spend P1 million daily and still not worry about anything financially for the rest of their lives.

Here’s an even clearer picture.

Those guys can sit idly for the rest of their lives, spend P1 million a day and contribute to charity in massive doses and not have to worry about anything for the rest of their lives.

That’s because their money works for them.

But guess what these guys still do?

Try to hazard a guess as to what these guys, who probably no longer now what a P100 bill looks like, still do.

Work.

Rex says they work because they cannot imagine living a day doing nothing.

The nerve, these guys.

I mean, if you were earning P365 million a year plus plus, would you still work?

The general consensus of the audience was a resounding NO.

And that, says Rex, is why they are that rich and we aren’t.