The Art of Spending Money Quotes

“Another successful entertainer, Jimmy Carr, says, “Everyone is jealous of what you’ve got, no one is jealous of how you got it.”
― Morgan Housel, The Art of Spending Money: Simple Choices for a Richer Life

“Spend less than you make. Quietly compound. Money serves you, not the other way around. No one is thinking about you as much as you are. Independence is wealth. Health is wealth. Aim to be a good ancestor. Love your family.”
― Morgan Housel, The Art of Spending Money: Simple Choices for a Richer Life

“There’s this idea in relationships that you can’t be happy with a partner if you can’t be happy without them. It’s the same for spending money.”
― Morgan Housel, The Art of Spending Money: Simple Choices for a Richer Life

“I don’t think these two points contradict each other. Remember, the opposite of a good idea can also be a good idea. They are equally important.”
― Morgan Housel, The Art of Spending Money: Simple Choices for a Richer Life

“Money is like gasoline during a road trip,” says author Tim O’Reilly. “You don’t want to run out of gas on your trip, but you’re not doing a tour of gas stations.”
― Morgan Housel, The Art of Spending Money: Simple Choices for a Richer Life

“Recall the fascinating finding from behavioral finance that having more money is more likely to make you happy if you were already happy before you had more money.”
― Morgan Housel, The Art of Spending Money: Simple Choices for a Richer Life

“Every few years there’s a story of a country bumpkin who has no education and a low-wage job but manages to save and compound tens of millions of dollars.”
― Morgan Housel, The Art of Spending Money: Simple Choices for a Richer Life

“Good memories are the closest thing to living for today while compounding for tomorrow. The anonymous Twitter account FedSpeak once wrote”
― Morgan Housel, The Art of Spending Money: Simple Choices for a Richer Life

“We value the attention money brings us more than we value the comfort and convenience of stuff that money can buy.”
― Morgan Housel, The Art of Spending Money: Simple Choices for a Richer Life

“Money is less about numbers and more about stories - stories we tell ourselves about what matters, what makes us happy and how we measure success.

Understanding our emotions, our biases, hopes and fears, can guide us toward smarter choices. Choices that reflect who we are, what we value and how we want to live.

Desiring less can have the same impact on your well-being as gaining more money. But it's not only more in your control; it's a game you can actually win, leading to durable contentment instead of fleeting happiness.

If you already have some of the core ingredients for happiness, spending money can be like leverage for a good life.

The people I admire most have a way of escaping the bubble of culture. Sometimes via religion, sometimes via time in nature, sometimes via old books. Without such an escape, propaganda wins. You stop thinking for yourself. Modern delusions grow into an all-consuming mind virus.

Envy is inversely correlated with self-examination. The less you know yourself, the more you look to others to get an idea of your worth. But the more you delve into who you are, the less you seek from others and the dissolution of envy begins.

Money you haven't spent buys something intangible but valuable: freedom, independence and being able to spend time in your own way. Every dollar of savings buys a claim check on the future. And every dollar of debt you hold is a piece of your future that someone else controls.

I think bragging is the inverse of how satisfied you are with your life.
What do you do when your real life exceeds your dreams?
Keep it to yourself.
The more you want people's attention and the more you try to focus that attention on how smart, rich and successful you are, the highest the odds that you're trying to fill some sort of emotional hole.

The more your identity becomes attached to your physical possessions, the more other people's thoughts about you influence your spending decisions and the more eager you are to constantly wow those people with something newer, bigger, better and more expensive.

The more susceptible you are to advertising, the less satisfied you are with your own life. You're desperate for someone to tell you what you should like because you haven't yet figured it out for yourself.”
― Morgan Housel, The Art of Spending Money: Simple Choices for a Richer Life

“No amount of money can compensate for a lack of character, honesty, and genuine empathy toward others.”
― Morgan Housel, The Art of Spending Money: Simple Choices for a Richer Life

“How do you raise a kid to be so normal when their surroundings are so extreme? “It’s not complicated,” he told me. “Money has never been part of our identity.” What was, I asked? “Loving each other, being good employers, being good citizens. That’s what we talked about. And that’s what we judged others by.” He said despite knowing from a young age that his family had more money and toys than anyone else he knew, his parents never so much as implied that this made them superior to anyone else. Money was a tool to leverage who they were, but it never controlled or defined who they were.”
― Morgan Housel, The Art of Spending Money: Simple Choices for a Richer Life

“Dívida social é o que surge quando o modo como você gasta seu dinheiro influencia o que as pessoas pensam de você de uma maneira indesejada. Geralmente é uma forma oculta de dívida, o que a torna especialmente perigosa. Às vezes, é a inveja que as pessoas sentem de você. Às vezes, é o fato de você se sentir subitamente superior às pessoas de cuja companhia costumava gostar. Pode ser até mesmo um crescimento nas próprias expectativas, resultante da melhora de seu estilo de vida. Existem”
― Morgan Housel, A arte de gastar dinheiro: Escolhas simples para uma vida equilibrada

“Desire is a hidden form of debt that must be repaid before you get to feel any happiness.”
― Morgan Housel, The Art of Spending Money: Simple Choices for a Richer Life

“jealous of no one”
― Morgan Housel, The Art of Spending Money: Simple Choices for a Richer Life

“Who’s paying attention? Mostly strangers”
― Morgan Housel, The Art of Spending Money: Simple Choices for a Richer Life

“There is only one success—to be able to spend your life in your own way.”
― Morgan Housel, The Art of Spending Money: Simple Choices for a Richer Life

“I once heard someone say that a high-end Toyota is a nicer car than an entry level BMW”
― Morgan Housel, The Art of Spending Money: Simple Choices for a Richer Life

“Enduring happiness is found in contentment, so those happiest with money tend to be those who have found a way to stop thinking about it. You can value it, appreciate it, even marvel at it. But if money never leaves your mind, it’s likely you’ve found yourself with an obsession, where it controls you. The best use of money is as a tool to leverage who you are, but never to define who you are.”
― Morgan Housel, The Art of Spending Money: Simple Choices for a Richer Life

“Happiness is complicated”
― Morgan Housel, The Art of Spending Money: Simple Choices for a Richer Life

“Status Anxiety, Alain de Botton”
― Morgan Housel, The Art of Spending Money: Simple Choices for a Richer Life

“If you’re fortunate enough to live in a prosperous region, in a prosperous era, surrounded by the ability to learn about the world and express who you are—a beneficiary of the accumulated efforts and wisdom of the one hundred billion people who came before you—the more you should go out of your way to appreciate what money can’t buy. Realize that having money might highlight or magnify an incredible life, but it cannot create it on its own. Understand that people who have made different decisions than you, and ended up with a different outcome than you, can be just as smart, funny, insightful, and worthy as you. They do what makes sense to them, and they’re trying to find their way in a complex world. You do what makes sense to you, and you’re trying to find your way in a complex world.”
― Morgan Housel, The Art of Spending Money: Simple Choices for a Richer Life

“This is an important part of greed: People justify their actions, even when in hindsight those actions were clearly excessive or crazy. It’s different than knowing your actions are reckless and harmful but doing them anyway. That’s psychopathy. The common form of innocent greed is extrapolating with enthusiasm what worked in the past. It tempts you to do the same thing as before, but with twice the appetite.”
― Morgan Housel, The Art of Spending Money: Simple Choices for a Richer Life

“In a rational world, we’d try to calculate how much of what we did influenced the reward we received. We’d recognize that if you did this and then that happened, there are a million other variables you have no control over that also could have influenced that outcome. But that’s not a natural way to think. The default assumption when you’re rewarded for doing something is to assume that you doing this caused that to happen. If you’re looking for an answer to why that happened, it is the path of least resistance. Because, after all, your views are right and deserve to be rewarded. So of course the reward was caused by the thing you did. Others believe this as much as you. People watch you get a reward and—because they imagine how they would feel if they got a reward—they get excited by your achievement. Praise. Attention. Admiration. And yes, jealousy and envy. It all feels good to you, and reinforces the idea that you got rewarded because your views and actions were right. And you want more of it. Success makes it easy to say, “I was right before, so now I’m going to double down.”
― Morgan Housel, The Art of Spending Money: Simple Choices for a Richer Life

“If you have accurate views, you’ll make good decisions, and those decisions will be rewarded by your peers with admiration, your bosses with pay raises, and your body with health. It’s such an appealing, attractive thought. It’s hard to make it through the day admitting you don’t know how the world works. So almost no one does it. We tell ourselves that our beliefs are correct, and correct views will be rewarded. The conviction that whatever you believe is right, and you deserve to be right because you’ve put in so much effort to form those beliefs, and correct beliefs will be rewarded by the world, is such a common and innocent idea.”
― Morgan Housel, The Art of Spending Money: Simple Choices for a Richer Life

“The point is that when you understand how quickly small expenses compound into enormous lost returns, you view the world differently. You realize that building a long-term fortune has less to do with big, brilliant decisions and more to do with small, consistent decisions compounded over a long period of time.”
― Morgan Housel, The Art of Spending Money: Simple Choices for a Richer Life

“Warren Buffett was so obsessed with compounding at an early age that he measured current expenses by what that amount would be worth in the future if he instead invested it and let it grow. A haircut, in his mind, cost $30,000—that’s what the few bucks would be worth in the future if he instead let it compound. An expensive suit cost millions in forgone future investment returns. A car wash wasn’t worth it under this logic; it would cost tens of thousands of dollars in future money to remove some dirt. “I’m not sure I want to blow $500,000 that way,” Buffett would tell friends when pondering whether to spend a few bucks.”
― Morgan Housel, The Art of Spending Money: Simple Choices for a Richer Life

“Author Kevin Kelly writes, “Tend to the small things. More people are defeated by blisters than mountains.”
― Morgan Housel, The Art of Spending Money: Simple Choices for a Richer Life

“Jonas Salk, inventor of the polio vaccine, was once asked what his main aim in life was. “To be a good ancestor,” he replied.”
― Morgan Housel, The Art of Spending Money: Simple Choices for a Richer Life

“Using price as a measure of how much joy you’ll get out of a purchase can miss one of the most important lessons in business history: Premium prices are often found on branded products, and the purpose of a brand is not to signal quality. It’s to signal consistency. An important feature of life in the United States before 1850 is that most people never traveled more than a few dozen miles from their birthplace. Life was local. You ate food grown in your town. Your house was made of local lumber. Your clothes were sewn by a local seamstress. You knew the person who made them. That person was often yourself. The industrial revolution and the Civil War changed that. Millions of people and soldiers were suddenly on the move, and railroads provided a way to transfer goods farther and faster than ever before. Robert Gordon writes in his book The Rise and Fall of American Growth: “As America steadily became more urban and as real incomes rose, the share of food and clothing produced at home declined sharply…. Many American men had their first experience of canned food as Union soldiers during the Civil War.” This was one of the biggest breakthroughs in history. But it posed a problem. For the first time, consumers were disconnected from the person who made their food. For most of history, a bad product was either your own fault or could be taken up face-to-face with a local merchant. But canned food came from dozens of suppliers, none of whom customers knew or could identify. Without accountability, quality was horrendous. Harper’s Weekly wrote in 1869: “The city people are in constant danger of buying unwholesome [canned meat]; the dealers are unscrupulous, and the public uneducated.” No one knew who to trust. The William Underwood Company solved this problem. Underwood was one of dozens of canned meat suppliers. Recognizing that canned meat had a reputation for inconsistency, Underwood created a red devil logo consumers would recognize. It added a tagline: “Branded with the devil, but fit for gods.” The logo re-created the familiarity that face-to-face commerce had achieved for most of history. No matter what part of the country they were in, consumers who saw the devil logo knew they were getting a specific product made by a specific company under specific quality standards. They were happy to pay more for Underwood meat because it reduced the gamble they would otherwise take with an unknown product.”
― Morgan Housel, The Art of Spending Money: Simple Choices for a Richer Life