Daniel Weimar’s Reviews > The Psychology of Money: Timeless Lessons on Wealth, Greed, and Happiness > Status Update

Reputation is invaluable. Freedom and independence are invaluable. Freedom and friends are invaluable. Being loved by those who want to love you is invaluable. Happiness is invaluable.

The hardest financial skill is getting the goalpost to stop moving

There is no reason to risk what you have and need for what you don’t have and don’t need.

To make money they didn’t have and didn’t need they risked what they did have and did need. That’s foolish. If you risk something that is important to you for some that that id unimportant to you it just does not make any sense

Be careful who you praise and admire. Be careful who you look down upon and wish to avoid becoming. Focus less on specific individuals and case studies and more on broad patterns.

We all do crazy stuff with money, because we’re all relatively new to this game and what looks crazy to you might make sense to me. But no one is crazy - we all make decisions based on our own unique experiences that seem to make sense to us in a given moment.

Few people make financial decisions purely with a spreadsheet. They make them at the dinner table, or in a company meeting. Places where personal history, your own unique view of the world, ego, pride, marketing, and odd incentives are scrambled together into a narrative that works for you.

Every decision people make with money is justified by taking the information they have at the moment and plugging it into their unique mental model of how the world works

Individual investors’ willingness to bear risk depends on personal history

To grasp why people bury themselves in debt you don’t need to study interest rates; you need to study the history of greed, insecurity, and optimism. To get why investors sell out at the bottom of a bear market you don’t need to study the math of expected future returns; you need to think about the agony of looking at your family and wondering if your investments are imperiling their future.