How we think about and approach our work as financial advisors and life in general.
It is foolish to pay someone for advice who doesn’t always put your interests first.
It’s your money. Lean on your team for advice, but don’t lose sight that it's your money.
We can't predict the future.
Just because something is possible, doesn’t mean it is probable.
An investment strategy that relies on facts and research is better and more sustainable than one that relies on gut feelings and hunches.
You can become rich by luck, but it’s almost impossible to stay rich with just luck.
We view our future self as a stranger, and as a result, tend to make decisions that disregard their best interest for our present self.
The more often you check your investments the lower your return.
Reading or watching financial pornography is hazardous to your wealth.
All debt is bad. Well that's not entirely true, but a good place to start.
We do not make good decisions under pressure or stress.
When in doubt, sleep on it.
The most important factor in your investment return is your behavior.
The second most important factor in your investment return is your allocation.
The last is the investments you choose.
One of the best books about money is Thinking, Fast and Slow by Nobel Prize winning behavioral finance psychologist Daniel Kahneman.
We are naturally wired to prefer instant gratification over delayed gratification, making saving and investing for a distant goal unnatural and challenging.
It’s better to be the casino than the gambler, which means it is better to determine where there is an investment advantage – even small – than it is to hope for luck in beating the odds.
Trying to get fancy with “alternative” investments usually creates a drag on your portfolio and hurts long-term performance.
Think about what kind of life you want to create for yourself and use money as a tool to help you achieve it.
New and shiny captures our attention more than predictable and trusted even if it does not serve us well.
There are many ways to create wealth.
The harder you work; the luckier you will get.
Greed and fear can wreak havoc on your investment success.
Being out of the market for even a few days can significantly affect your return.
People with certain characteristics tend to succeed more than others, and investments with certain characteristics tend to perform better than others. To gain an investment edge, it makes sense to invest a little more in those investments with the characteristics.
The Certified Financial Planner (CFP®) designation is the gold standard in financial planning.
Verify; trust. Verify; trust. Verify; trust. Etc.
The firm that manages your money shouldn’t be the same firm that holds your money.
Work with people you respect and enjoy being around.
It will serve you well to learn the language of money.
Get a team of professionals who work together and conspire to help you create and preserve your wealth.
Your environment is an invisible hand that plays an important role in how you make decisions about money.
The single biggest expense for most people is taxes, so it makes sense to find advisors who are obsessed with helping you minimize them.
If it sounds too good to be true, run the other way.
A sharp dressed advisor with a nice watch and fancy car doesn’t mean they know what they are doing.
Have two jobs – one as your career and the other at improving yourself.
Wealth creates a target so it’s important to take steps to protect your assets.
The most financially wealthy are those who buy, invest in, or create assets.
Stacking multiple financial strategies together is how to create exponential results.
Humans are wired to be terrible investors. The more you recognize this the better you will be at investing.
Your current financial condition is the result of your past decisions, but your future financial condition will be result of your decisions now.
If one of your advisor’s says “trust me,” run away.
This year’s hot investment is likely to be next year’s big loser.
Spend 99.99% of your time focused on the things you can control and the rest of your time trying to figure out how you can spend more of your time focusing just on those things you can control.
Most investors dislike losses much more than they enjoy gains.
Small positive actions over time create surprisingly meaningful results.
It would be great if you could successfully and consistently get out of the market before it goes down and back in before it goes up, but you can’t and there is 100+ years of research that shows nobody can.
Determining your risk tolerance is difficult and frustrating, but having a rough idea of your risk tolerance is infinitely better for your investment success than not knowing at all.
Over almost any time-period, passive index investing beats active management.
It’s probably not different this time.
Money is fantastic.
Money can provide freedom, security, and opportunity.
Being broke or in debt for long periods of time is a terrible existence.
If you could only take one lesson about money, it should be about your mental heuristics, cognitive biases, and common decision-making errors.
For the do-it-yourself investor, indexing is better than active management.
We can’t predict the next recession (and neither can the world’s leading economists).
