I Will Teach You to Be Rich: No Guilt. No Excuses. No B.S. Just a 6-Week Program That Works.

by Ramit Sethi

Cynics don’t want results; they want an excuse to not take action. Ironically, even if they win their own manufactured argument, they lose overall, because they’re stuck in a prison of their mind.

In relationships and work, we want to be better than average. In investing, average is great.

The 85 Percent Solution: Getting started is more important than becoming an expert.

when you look at investment literature, buy-and-hold investing wins over the long term, every time.

Spend extravagantly on the things I love and be relentlessly frugal about the things I don’t (e.g., live in a nice apartment in New York but not own a car)

What can we imagine doing in the next year that we’ll remember for the next fifty years?

book-buying rule: If you’re thinking about buying a book, just buy it.

Sometimes the most advanced thing you can do is the basics, consistently.

Part of creating your Rich Life is the willingness to be unapologetically different.

It’s not worth negotiating everything, but there are a few areas of life where negotiation is a Big Win.

For student loans, make an aggressive plan and minimize the amount of interest you pay. For credit cards, I squeeze every single benefit out of them.

If you’re booking travel or eating out, use a travel card to maximize rewards. For everything else, use a cash back card. The card I use for travel and eating out is the Chase Sapphire Reserve. For everything else, I use an Alliant cash back card. And for business, I use a Capital One cash back business card. For extra benefits, I have an Amex Platinum card.

how to consciously spend, which means cutting costs mercilessly on the things you don’t love, but spending extravagantly on the things you do.

“People who spent money to buy themselves time, such as by outsourcing disliked tasks, reported greater overall life satisfaction.”

The key to taking action is, quite simply, making your decisions automatic.

“I look back at the past few years of my life and at my bank account and I would gladly give away a hefty chunk of it and work longer if it meant I could have experienced more of the world and found more passions I could have for the rest of my life, especially with someone I had loved so much. I built my savings, but I never built my life.”

“resign yourself to the fact that diversifying yourself among risky assets provide[s] scant shelter from bad days or bad years, but that it does help protect against bad decades and generations, which can be far more destructive to wealth.”

For me, a Rich Life is about freedom—it’s about not having to think about money all the time and being able to travel and work on the things that interest me. It’s about being able to use money to do whatever I want—and not having to worry about taking a taxi or ordering what I want at a restaurant or how I’ll ever be able to afford a house.

I have to emphasize that buying a house is not just a natural step that everyone has to take at some point.