Financial Foresight Quotes

I live in a Spanish-style hillside home in Los Angeles, California. I paid $900,000 in 1995. It's perhaps worth about $3m now. Thankfully, I paid off my mortgage before the crash because I could see it coming. I worried that I would be caught having to pay off a very high mortgage for a house I couldn't sell.

I'm not gonna buy something without planning. If I buy $100,000 worth of gold, I gotta put $100,000 aside for my family in case something happens. You look kind of stupid wearing all that gold and you didn't have no plan.

I believe that the biggest mistake that most people make when it comes to their retirement is they do not plan for it. They take the same route as Alice in the story from "Alice in Wonderland," in which the cat tells Alice that surely she will get somewhere as long as she walks long enough. It may not be exactly where you wanted to get to, but you certainly get somewhere.

Money is very difficult to think about. So, we think about money as the opportunity cost of money. So, we at some point went to a Toyota dealership and we asked people, what will you not be able to do in the future if you bought this Toyota? Now, you would expect people to have an answer. But people were kind of shocked by the question. They never thought about it before. So, the most we got was people said, "Well, if I can't buy this Toyota, if I buy this Toyota, I can't buy a Honda." What is this thing? What is this value of price? Very hard to think about it.

Be not penny-wise. Riches have wings. Sometimes they fly away of themselves, and sometimes they must be set flying to bring in more.

There is nothing which continues longer than a moderate fortune; nothing of which one sees sooner the end than a large fortune.

How do you 'invest in the future'? By borrowing $188 million every hour. That's what the Government of the United States is doing. It's spending one-fifth of a billion dollars it doesn't have every hour of every day of every week - all for your future!

One of the reasons I think people are increasingly nervous about U.S. debt is because they think that we are not actually digging ourselves out of the hole, but instead are digging ourselves into a deeper and deeper hole and will not be able to pay it back because we're not actually creating the new technologies that will enable us to pay back and the money somehow is not really being invested in the future or in progress.

Far too many of my peers were taken in by the jet-setting rock star lifestyle and didn't realise the money might not last forever - but I have always had an eye on the future and invest in a syndicate to share risk.

I woke up one day and I was like, "I don't have anything to save for myself for the future." That's when I started archiving things. I take four or five things that are really key to each collection, and I restore them or, in some cases, remake parts of them, and archive them.

My reputation is as a fiscal hawk. At least, I hope that it is.

Anyone who is not investing now is missing a tremendous opportunity.

The only people who become wealthy by being concerned with the future are insurance companies.

The foresight of financial experts was, as so often, a poor guide to the future.

Save your money. You're going to need twice as much money in your old age as you think.

Economic tough times are great times to be investing in the future.

President Marcos was investing in precious metals long before he entered politics.

Save for your goals. Take note of what's coming your way - vacations, the holidays, what ever is going to cost you money - and start saving ahead of time so that you have a stash when the time comes.

The prospect of penury in age is so gloomy and terrifying that every man who looks before him must resolve to avoid it; and it must be avoided generally by the science of sparing.

The key issue when you're looking at cost cutting is to always plan for the future.

Give me five minutes and I can predict your financial future for the rest of your life.

If you are able to look beyond near term trouble, you have an advantage over many professional investors

I'm much more of a realist. I'm really practical. I'm the kind of person that calls my business manager and says, OK, if it were all to end today, how many months do I have to live?

When Hume and Adam Smith prophesied that a little increase of national debt beyond the then amount of it, would probably occasion bankruptcy; the main cause of their error was the natural one, of not being able to see the vast increase of productive power to which the nation would subsequently obtain.

I realized sometime in the early '80s that if I didn't do something - like planning for the future in a way, a kind of pension or something - that if I didn't do something there and then, I was going to be condemned to forever present my three years as a pop star, condensed, as a stage act for the rest of my life. Because that's normally what happens to people in the pop business.