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Really!! Listen

Money: being the subject thought about more than almost any other. It's not surprising that an awful lot has been said about it. Much of it is mindless: some is even actively designed to deceive. But much else that has been said about money would've served you well, had you been of a mind to listen. But you didn't. So, before you once again become greedy but penniless, teary-eyed former employees, Pay Attention:

For Enron, WorldCom, etc. Employees

• Buy low, sell high.
  -  Unknown

• Don't put all your eggs in one basket.
  -  Your Mother

• The large print giveth, and the small print taketh away.
  -  Tom Waits

• Annual income, twenty pounds; annual expenditure, nineteen pounds; result, happiness. Annual income, twenty pounds; annual expenditure, twenty-one pounds; result, misery.
  -  Charles Dickens
  Dickens got this advice from his father, a financial failure, and later put it into the mouth of Mr. Micawber - perpetual debtor and optimist - in David Copperfield.

• Beware of little expenses. A small leak will sink a great ship.
  -  Benjamin Franklin
  The good news, he further counseled. Is that "a penny saved is a penny earned." (Not so, griped humorist Ogden Nash: "A penny saved is...impossible!")

• October is one of the singularly most dangerous months to speculate in stocks. Others are November, December, January, February, March, April, May, June, July, August and September.
  -  Mark Twain

• A thousand dollars invested at just 8% for 400 years grows to $23 quadrillion. But the first 100 years are the hardest.
  -  Sidney Homer

• The people who sustain the worst losses are usually the ones who overreach, and it's not necessary! Steady, moderate gains will get you where you want to go.
  -  John Train

• I can calculate the motions of heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people.
  -  Isaac Newton
  Newton was a heavy investor in what came to be known as the South Sea Bubble - which predated our dot.com bubble by nearly 300 years. He lost 20,000 pounds, a vast sum in those days. While by far the biggest enterprise of its time, the South Sea Company inspired scores of other ventures - including every financial historian's favorite, a stock issue "for carrying on an undertaking of great advantage: but nobody to know what it is." Which is not too different from some of the stocks Wall Street was recommending just a couple of years ago. Human nature doesn't change.

• He is richest who is content with least.
  -  Socrates

• There are two possible courses to affluence: Wants may be 'easily satisfied' either by producing much or desiring little.
  -  Marshall Sahlins

• Probably the greatest harm done by vast wealth is the harm that we of moderate means do ourselves when we let the vices of envy and hatred enter deep into our own natures.
  -  Teddy Roosevelt in 1902
  It is so much wiser to count your blessings than to count your neighbor's money.

• A great investment opportunity occurs when a marvelous business encounters a one-time huge, but solvable, problem.
  -  Warren Buffett

• I like to buy [stock in] a business any fool can run, because eventually one will.
  -  Peter Lynch

• If you don't know who you are, the stock market is an expensive place to find out.
  -  Adam Smith

• Your position size in any investment should be roughly 10 to 15 percent of your bankroll. But never buy less than $500 of any investment. Anything less and you're gonna get chewed up on commissions.
  -  CNBC's Dylan Ratigan

For the ladies:

• I walked home to save bus fare.
  Gee, you could have saved a lot more by not taking a taxi.
  -  Old joke

• One definition of retirement: Twice as much husband and half as much as money.
  -  Unknown

For the rest of us:

• Buy straw hats in the wintertime. Summer will surely come.
  -  Bernard Baruch

• Very few American investors buy any stock for the sake of something which is going to happen more than six months hence, even though its probability is exceedingly high; and it is out of taking advantage of this psychological peculiarity of theirs that most money is made.
  -  John Maynard Keynes

• There is no dignity quite so impressive, and no independence quite so important, as living within your means.
  -  Calvin Coolidge

• Every debt is ultimately paid, if not by the debtor, then eventually by the creditor.
  -  Jim Grant

• It is more difficult to give money away intelligently that it is to earn it in the first place.
  -  Andrew Carnegie

• Every gun that is fired, every warship launched. . .signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. The world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.
  -  Dwight D. Eisenhower

• Try not to become a man of success but rather try to become a man of value.
  -  Albert Einstein

Stow your chivalry and split the tab, sport. The average cost of six dates will run you $1,198 in New York City, $823 in L.A., and $736 in Chicago. On the plus side, it will cost less on your conscience than hiring a hooker. The average U.S. renter is worth less than $5,000, while the average homeowner is worth more than $180,000. Get a loan, buy a place, and tell your landlord to keep the security deposit on your apartment as last month's rent. Then moon him.

The average American male is buried under $2,369 of credit card debt. Chipping away at the balance with $100 monthly payments at 17.5 percent interest will take 30 months and cost an extra $560 in interest. Check it out: You just pissed a big-screen TV up against the fence!

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