Quotes from Gary Belsky

Race legend Richard Petty's first career win came in a Convertibles competition at the Columbia Speedway in South Carolina in 1959.

Although men doubtless continued to punch each other for fun and bragging rights, the sport as such didn't formally resurface until the late seventeenth century, in Great Britain.

Such guidelines might be instinctive (a long line at a restaurant probably means business is good) or societally reinforced (it's a good idea to stretch your budget when buying a house), but in either case, they are sometimes misleading.

home prices don't rise as fast or as much as Americans think, and even when they do, such levels are rarely sustainable (as we have seen in recent years). So there is often no financial justification for buying more house than you can afford in the hope that price hikes will reward you later.

Americanesia Expressaphobia, n 1. Financial affliction, first diagnosed in late twentieth century, where the sufferer forgets the amount charged on a credit card but is terribly afraid that it's way too much. Closely related to Visago, n, where a high level of debt prompts feelings of nausea and dizziness.

you tend to sell winning investments more readily than losing ones. • you're seriously tempted to take money out of the stock market when prices fall.

Throughout this book we'll gradually build an argument that many individuals should consider an automatic approach to investing by relying primarily on mutual funds—specifically index mutual funds, which try to do nothing more than mimic the performance of the stock and bond markets in general.

For diversification to work as a salve for the pains of loss, you must avoid looking at losses or gains in isolation.

Our advice? Put no more than 10 percent of your nest egg into stocks of individual corporations. The rest should be spread out over other kinds of investments.

That's why it's often helpful to invest in a spreadsheet computer program such as Excel, a software package like Quicken, or any number of Internet sites, that can display and total all your investments.

The goal is not to justify your decision to buy the investment at whatever price you originally paid for it.

So ask yourself: "If the stock market drops 25 percent tomorrow, would I be tempted to pull all or some of my money out?" If the answer is yes, you're probably unprepared for the ups and downs of the stock market.

The sting of losing money, for example, often leads investors to pull out of the stock market unwisely when prices dip.

The Greeks saw wrestling as elemental, which likely explains why most ancient forms involved naked combatants who were doused in olive oil and often covered with a thin layer of sand to protect their skin from summer's sun and winter's cold.

That's why any money you'll need within the next five years should be removed from stocks and put into cash or cash equivalents like government bonds.

you tend to beat yourself up when your decisions turn out poorly.

How many tales have you heard—or lived through—in which Jane and John Homebuyer couldn't pull the trigger on their dream house only to see the price go up when another bidder entered the game? Of greater concern, though, is the conflict sparked by the glut of investment options available today.

And that is why, when attempting to balance and evaluate their investment port-folio, people often err by failing to knock down mental walls among accounts. As a result, their true portfolio mix—the combination of stocks, bonds, real estate, insurance policies, mutual funds, and the like—is often not what they think, and their investment performance often suffers.

Trying to extract every last dime out of your financial decisions is likely to incur significant social and psychic costs. As you've no doubt noticed, not everyone likes a person who's obsessed with money. And even if everyone did, an insistence on always making the best financial decision in a given situation can lead to excessive worry and anxiety.

Would I buy this today, at this price?" If not, you may not want to own it any longer.

People tend to overvalue what belongs to them relative to the value they would place on the same possession or circumstance if it belonged to someone else.

People place too much emphasis on their out-of-pocket expenses (what they have to pay now) and too little value on opportunity costs (what they miss by not taking an action).

In essence, the endowment effect is really just another manifestation of loss aversion: People