We generally tend to think of finance as a math-based field ... Finance is much closer to something like psychology where it's a soft, mushy topic with a lot of nuance... People in the United States think about money differently from people who live in other parts of the world and vice versa. It's a much more nuanced topic.

We spend so much time focusing on how to increase your income [and] how to increase your wealth, and I think it is just as important to spend time on trying to manage your expectations and keeping your expectations from growing faster than your income. Because it doesn't matter how wealthy you are—if your expectations are rising with your income, you're not going to feel any better off.

Wealth is what you don't see. Wealth is the money that you have not spent. It's the cars you didn't purchase; it's the house you didn't purchase; it's the first class upgrade that you didn't buy. It's money in the bank or invested that you have not spent yet.

Earning average returns for an above average period of time is way more lucrative than trying to earn superior returns for a shorter period of time.

Live below your means, save your money, buy a diverse low-cost portfolio, and be patient. That's like 90% of what you need to know to do well in investing over time.

The trait that you need to do well with money over time, no matter who you are, is a well-calibrated sense of your future regret.

If you look at who buys lottery tickets, what group of Americans buys the most lottery tickets? ... It is the poorest Americans ... They spend an average of $400 per year on lottery tickets.

Personal finance is much more personal than it is finance.

What are the three biggest economic stories of our adult lives. By far, by an order of magnitude, it's September 11th, Lehman Brothers collapsing, and COVID ... And the common denominator is no one saw them coming.

Volatility is the cost of admission to market returns ... You can do very well over a long period of time in investing, but you have to give something up for that. Like anything else in life, there's a price, and the price you have to pay is putting up with volatility and uncertainty.

What you want more than anything in life is what you want and cannot have. That's what you're going to chase with all of your effort is the thing that you want and cannot have.

The golden rule of finance is live within your means and be patient. If you can do that, you don't need to know that much more about finance to do well over a long period of time.

One of the things in finance is that you don't need to make many great decisions to do well over time; you just have to consistently not screw up. If you can consistently avoid screwing up, you'll probably do not just okay but phenomenal over time.

This is where moderation in finance is actually going to lead to the biggest returns—because what matters is not necessarily what are the best returns you can earn this year? That's what everyone chases, but that's not what matters. What matters is what are the best returns that you can sustain for the longest period of time?

Is [Warren] Buffett a good investor? Yes, of course he is. But his real secret is that he's been a good investor for 80 years. That's the takeaway that we should learn from him—that time is really what drives all big success over time.

Every dollar that you don't spend is money that you are actually spending on independence ... That's why I save money.

If you can earn average returns for 50 years, you're going to end up in the top 1% of all investors—and you do it with zero effort.

There is not one right way to manage money, to save it, to spend it. You have figure out what works for you; and what works for me might not work for you. There's not one answer.

You are very aware of how much you've changed in the last 20 years ... But most people, if you actually dig into it, they think, if you say, 'Who will you be in 20 years from now?,' they think they'll roughly be the same person they are today. It's always this belief that 'I have grown so much in the past, but I'm done growing.'

We have two young kids, and we are pretty hell-bent on not spoiling them. They live an amazing life. And we live in a great house. They'll have a great education. They'll live the top .01% of lives. But we don't want to raise spoiled little pricks.

In all of evolution, what matters is not how much success you have; it matters that you have more success than the other person.

Outside of India and Africa, almost the entire world is shrinking population-wise ... China's working-age population, age 16 to 64, will decline by 200 million people between now and 2050.

No one is more impressed with your stuff than you are, and once you realize that no one is more impressed with your stuff than you are, it takes a lot of the pressure off of the social treadmill (the rat race) of having new stuff and having fancy stuff that serves no other purpose than sending a social signal.

The market has declined on average 10% every 11 months ... It's fallen more than 20% on average every 3 years [and] more than 30% on average at least once per decade.

People should save like a pessimist, and invest like an optimist.

I think the closest analogy to the book industry is probably professional sports where 99.9% of high school basketball players will never make the NBA.... but then you have a couple of LeBron James/Michael Jordan's who go on to make a billion-dollars doing it.

I'm pretty sure there are more billionaire authors than there are billionaire athletes—even in a world in which 99.9% of books will sell, you know, a couple thousand copies or less, if that.

No one is really that crazy with how they spend their money or save their money. It makes sense to them in that moment.

All behavior makes sense with enough information.

You can have all the financial sophistication in the world, but if you do not manage your relationship with greed and fear, it has the ability to neutralize all of the financial sophistication that you have.

People do crazy things with their money all the time ... They make just boneheaded decisions. They blow money. They make terrible investments. But no one is actually crazy. What I mean by that is when everyone makes a decision with their money in real-time, it is checking all the boxes that they need to in their head in that given moment.

If you are someone who is lucky enough to have a rising income, a rising net worth, and your expectations rise at lockstep with your wealth... you're not going to feel better off.

There's no other field other than finance where someone with no education, no background, no sophistication, [and] no training can massively outperform someone who has the best education, the best training, [and] the best background.

[Financial] bubbles cause their damage when people who are playing a long-term game take their cues from people who are rationally playing a short-term game.