Best Quotes on Personal Finance

I plan to continuously add to this post whenever I encounter great quotes on personal finance I want to remember.

Finding and Funding a Good Life

Empirically, people who prioritize time over money are happier, have greater social connection, have a better relationship with their spouse, and are more likely to choose a job that they enjoy. Even thinking about money can be problematic. People prompted to think about money are less interpersonally attuned, less prosocial, caring, and warm, and they eschew interdependence. Counterintuitively, while money can buy time, people with higher incomes feel that they have less time, and people overestimate how much happier they would be with a higher income. Another symptom of the general preference for money over time is that people are often unwilling to trade money for time, or framed differently, they undervalue their time, likely because measuring the monetary cost of time is difficult.

Gratitude, savoring small pleasures, mindfulness, self-efficacy – the feeling of control, and hope and optimism are all sources of positive emotion.

The Little Book of Common Sense Investing

The name Benjamin Graham is intimately connected, indeed almost synonymous, with “value investing” and the search for undervalued securities. But his classic book gives far more attention to the down-to-earth basics of portfolio policy—the straightforward, uncomplicated principles of diversification and rational long-term expectations, also overarching themes of this Little Book that you are now reading—than to solving the sphinx-like riddle of selecting superior stocks through careful security analysis.

Franklin: There are no Gains, without Pains. He that would catch Fish, must venture his Bait. Bogle: Invest you must. The biggest risk is the long-term risk of not putting your money to work at a generous return, not the short-term (but nonetheless real) risk of market volatility.

Franklin: Industry, Perseverance, and Frugality make Fortune yield.

Charlie Munger, the Complete Investor

The idea of caring that someone is making money faster is one of the deadly sins.  Envy is a really stupid sin because it’s the only one you could never possibly have any fun at. There’s a lot of pain and no fun.  Why would you want to get on that trolley?

Missing out on some opportunity never bothers us. What’s wrong with someone getting a little richer than you?  It’s crazy to worry about this.

The Psychology of Money

”When most people say they want to be a millionaire, what they might actually mean is ‘I’d like to spend a million dollars.’ And that is literally the opposite of being a millionaire.”

Miscellaneous

“…Fidelity studied which customer investing accounts performed the best: They were the ones held by people who had forgotten they even had Fidelity accounts, and so did no buying or selling from them.”

This is not financial advice.