My highlighted passages from The Psychology of Money by @morganhousel. Thread below

1. The 401k - the backbone savings vehicle of American retirement - did not exist until 1978. The Roth Ira was not born until 1998. If it were a person it would be barely old enough to drink

2. NYU professor Scott Galloway has a related idea that is so important to remember when judging success - both your own and others': "Nothing is as good or as bad as it seems."
3. Margin of safety - you can call it room for error or redundancy
4. "Every job looks easy when you're not the one doing it because the challenges faced by someone in the arena are often invisible to those in the crowd."
5. "The average equity fund investor underperformed the funds they invested in by half a percent per year, according to Morningstar - the result of buying and selling when they should have just bought and held."
6. "The implosion of the dot-com bubble in the really 2000s reduced household wealth by $6.2 trillion. The end of the housing bubble cut away more than $8 trillion. It's hard to overstate how socially devastating financial bubbles can be. They ruin lives."
7. (Perhaps my favorite) "The formation of bubbles isn't so much about people irrationally participating in long term investing. They're about people somewhat rationally moving toward short-term trading to capture momentum that had been feeding on itself."
8. "Pessimism just sounds smarter and more plausible than optimism. Tell someone that everything will be great and they're likely to either shrug you off or offer a skeptical eye. Tell someone they're in danger and you have their undivided attention."
9. "Only 2.5% of Americans owned stocks on the eve of the great crash of 1929 that sparked the Great Depression."
10. "Progress happens too slowly to notice, but setbacks happen too quickly to ignore. There are lots of overnight tragedies. There are rarely overnight miracles."
11. "Growth is driven by compounding which always takes time. Destruction is driven by single points of failure, which can happen in seconds, and loss of confidence, which can happen in an instant."
12. "Expecting things to be bad is the best way to be pleasantly surprised when they're not. Which, ironically, is something to be optimistic about."
13. "It can't be overstated: there is no greater force in finance than room for error, and the higher the stakes, the wider it should be."
14. "Time is the most powerful force in investing."

More from Life

TW: suicidal ideation.

At the darkest days of the abuse I was being subjected to I decided to attend a conference for women in Los Angeles. I convinced my mother in law to pay for it because I couldn’t afford it. @ChristineCaine was preaching. I was desperate...
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I wanted to die, I didn’t see a way out and I had tried everything. I imagined many ways to die daily. The most recurring one was throwing my car down a bridge I had to drive over every day. I never did it because my kids were in the car and I was afraid one of them would...

2/

survive or I’d kill someone on the way down.

Christine spoke about honoring your pastors even when they weren’t great, she spoke of us expecting too much of pastors and how wrong that was. She said God would use our testimony if we submitted to our pastors.

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She said “honor your pastors, God will honor you.” She said more about having disagreed with her pastors but she submitted and God honored her and now she’s blessed. How if they are faithfully serving God, we need to support them and not forfeit what God has for us.

4/

I felt my heart drop into my stomach. I got up and went to the bathroom because I couldn’t breath and I felt like I was going to faint if I didn’t scream. I now know I was having a panic attack. I sat on the toilet w/my head between my legs, breathed and wept..
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