Three great quotes for financial success

One of my favourite sites on the internet is Farnam Street. It’s a place where one can learn to think and reason, a skill which is, to my mind, sorely lacking in society at large and certainly isn’t taught in schools. The free weekly newsletter is a goldmine of thought-provoking content.

What follows are three quotes that have caught my eye recently, so I thought I’d share them with some additional thoughts from me!

I think that this can apply to any endeavour worth pursuing. Whether it’s getting rich (yuk – hate that expression) or getting in shape, or improving your performance at a sport or musical instrument - consistency is everything.

Given that we’re a financial planning company, let’s look at the finance side of things. If you want to build up money, you need to save regularly, by which I mean every month. This happens best by automating your savings to happen the day after payday. Also, ensuring small but regular increases in the amounts you save will help build your pots much more quickly.

Being consistent with your investment approach, rather than continually switching and following whatever is currently trendy, will maintain and build your wealth much more predictably.

Of all the 1000-plus families I’ve served in may career, only two have been lottery winners, and then fairly minor amounts. These were both cases of good fortune, but the vast majority of my clients have built generational wealth with disciplined consistency.

Investing should be a multi-decade endeavour, yet we only truly live in the present. And the present can be pretty scary at times.

As I write this we’re in the run-up to probably the most important Budget in 15 years, and there is lots of speculation about what Rachel Reeves might do and the impact on our lives of her decisions. But probably, in five or ten years’ time, we’ll have forgotten how we feel right now, and we’ll likely still be OK, financially speaking.

Having advised clients though the tech bubble bursting in 2000, the great financial crisis of 2008 and through the pandemic, markets have been very unpleasant places to be invested at times. And yet, over the past 24 years, investors who have held their nerve and stayed invested throughout have done very well.

This quote is from a different source – Alex Hormozi – who reminds us that money doesn’t really matter; life matters. Our health, our relationships, our time and how we use it – those things matter.

This is why we often encourage clients to ‘front-end load’ their spending, that is, spend more earlier in their retirement on the assumption that later, when health and energy are less guaranteed, we’ll likely need to spend less. This stops too much money being left in the estate when it would have been better spent or given away.

Material wealth isn’t something to be striven towards, except to the extent that it enables us to live on our own terms. It’s a means to an end, never an end in itself.

I wonder, do you have any favourite quotes that you refer to frequently? I’ll leave you with my favourite quote of all time, from Eleanor Roosevelt:

Article written by Pete Matthew