Sublime

He is both well liked and very intelligent. He is also very rich. I consider his annual “Chairman’s Letter” (in the Berkshire annual report) to be indispensable reading for anyone wanting to do well in business.

But everything I’ve learned about personal finance tells me that everyone—without exception—will eventually face a huge expense they did not expect—and they don’t plan for these expenses specifically because they did not expect them.

The question we should ask of both Gupta and Madoff is why someone worth hundreds of millions of dollars would be so desperate for more money that they risked everything in pursuit of even more.

millionaire, yet has no net worth.

The premise of this book is that doing well with money has a little to do with how smart you are and a lot to do with how you behave. And behavior is hard to teach, even to really smart people.

money has the unfortunate characteristic of becoming less valuable the more you have. Economists refer to this as “diminishing marginal utility.” If you have $100 in your bank account, each extra dollar is meaningful, and $1,000 can be life changing. If you have $10 million in your bank account, another $1,000 is irrelevant.

what is the effect of cash gifts that are knowingly earmarked for consumption and the propping up of a certain lifestyle? We find that the giving of such gifts is the single most significant factor that explains lack of productivity among the adult children of the affluent. All too often such “temporary” gifts affect the recipient’s psyche. Cash