Morgan Housel Quotes

I have observed that not the man who hopes when others despair, but the man who despairs when others hope, is admired by a large class of persons as a sage.

Realizing the future might not look anything like the past is a special kind of skill that is not generally looked highly upon by the financial forecasting community.

A one-hundred-year event doesn’t mean it happens every one hundred years. It means there’s about a 1 percent chance of it occurring in any given year.

Be nicer and less flashy. No one is impressed with your possessions as much as you are. You might think you want a fancy car or a nice watch. But what you probably want is respect and admiration. And you’re more likely to gain those things through kindness and humility than horsepower and chrome.

Use money to gain control over your time, because not having control of your time is such a powerful and universal drag on happiness. The ability to do what you want, when you want, with who you want, for as long as you want to, pays the highest dividend that exists in finance.

The safest way to try to get what you want is to try to deserve what you want.

Compounding works best when you can give a plan years or decades to grow. This is true for not only savings but careers and relationships. Endurance is key. And when you consider our tendency to change who we are over time, balance at every point in your life becomes a strategy to avoid future regret and encourage endurance.

An appealing fiction happens when you are smart, you want to find solutions, but face a combination of limited control and high stakes. They are extremely powerful. They can make you believe just about anything.

don’t get it,” he says. “I’ve seen the cities. I’ve looked at the factories. You guys have the same knowledge, the same tools, the same ideas. Nothing has changed! Why are you poorer? Why are you more pessimistic?” There was one change the alien couldn’t see between 2007 and 2009: The stories we told ourselves about the economy.

The New York Times wrote in 1955 about the growing desire, but continued inability, to retire: “To rephrase an old saying: everyone talks about retirement, but apparently very few do anything about it.”6 It was not until the 1980s that the idea that everyone deserves, and should have, a dignified retirement took hold. And the way to get that dignified retirement ever since has been an expectation that everyone will save and invest their own money. Let me reiterate how new this idea is: The 401(k) — the backbone savings vehicle of American retirement — did not exist until 1978. The Roth IRA was not born until 1998.

To grasp why people bury themselves in debt, you don’t need to study interest rate: you need to sturdy the history of greed , insecurity and optimism.

1. More than I want big returns, I want to be financially unbreakable. And if I’m unbreakable I actually think I’ll get the biggest returns, because I’ll be able to stick around long enough for compounding to work wonders.

one of the most powerful ways to increase your savings isn’t to raise your income. It’s to raise your humility.

All of us,” he said, “are walking around with an illusion — an illusion that history, our personal history, has just come to an end, that we have just recently become the people that we were always meant to be and will be for the rest of our lives.” We tend to never learn this lesson.

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.