101 Financial Literacy Quotes To Inspire You!
Having a financial education is an important thing. Unfortunately, financial literacy is something that’s not often taught in high school. And sometimes we can find inspiration from the financial quotes coined by famous people. Here are 101 financial literacy quotes from some of the most influential people in history.
1. ”Financial peace isn’t the acquisition of stuff. It’s learning to live on less than you make, so you can give money back and have money to invest. You can’t win until you do this.” – Dave Ramsey
2. ”A wise person should have money in their head, but not in their heart.” – Jonathan Swift
3. ”When I was young I thought that money was the most important thing in life; now that I am old I know that it is.” – Oscar Wilde
4. “The more we knew about the power of money, the more distant we grew from the teachers and our classmates.” – Robert Kiyosaki
5. You’ve got to understand accounting. You’ve got to. That’s got to be like a language to you. You have to know what you’re reading. Some people have more aptitude for that than others, but that’s one thing I learned by myself. Now, I took courses afterwards, for example. But I learned it myself, and largely. So, you have to do that. – Warren Buffett
6. “A person can be highly educated, professionally successful, and financially illiterate.” – Robert Kiyosaki
7. “People have got to learn: if they don’t have cookies in the cookie jar, they can’t eat cookies.” – Suze Orman
8. “If you want to be rich and maintain your wealth, it’s important to be financially literate, in words as well as numbers.” – Robert Kiyosaki
9. “The number one problem in today’s generation and economy is the lack of financial literacy.” – Alan Greenspan
10. Rich people constantly learn and grow. Poor people think they already know.” – T. Harv Eker
11. “One of the reasons the rich get richer, the poor get poorer, and the middle class struggles in debt is that the subject of money is taught at home, not in school.” – Robert Kiyosaki
12. “If money is your hope for independence you will never have it. The only real security that a man will have in this world is a reserve of knowledge, experience, and ability.” – Henry Ford
13. “What we do is not beyond anyone else’s competence. I feel the same way about managing that I do about investing: It’s just not necessary to do extraordinary things to get extraordinary results.” – Warren Buffett
14. “Intelligence solves problems and produces money. Money without financial intelligence is money soon gone.” – Robert Kiyosaki
15. “Success is a learnable skill. You can learn to succeed at anything.” – T. Harv Eker
16. “Wise men learn by others harms, fools scarcely by their own.” – Benjamin Franklin
17. “When you lose something in your life, stop thinking it’s a loss for you… it is a gift you have been given so you can get on the right path to where you are meant to go, not to where you think you should have gone.” – Suze Orman
18. “A person either disciplines his finances or his finances discipline him.” – Orrin Woodward
19. ”More people should learn to tell their dollars where to go instead of asking them where they went.” – Roger Babson
20. “The important thing is to know what you know and know what you don’t know.” – Warren Buffett
21. “An investment in knowledge pays the best interest.” – Benjamin Franklin
22. “Smart financial planning – such as budgeting, saving for emergencies, and preparing for retirement – can help households enjoy better lives while weathering financial shocks. Financial education can play a key role in getting to these outcomes.” – Ben Bernanke
23. “The number one reason most people don’t get what they want is that they don’t know what they want.” – T. Harv Eker
24. “You can only become truly accomplished at something you love. Don’t make money your goal. Instead pursue the things you love doing and then do them so well that people can’t take their eyes off of you.” – Maya Angelou
25. “Money is such an amazing teacher: What you choose to do with your money shows whether you are truly powerful or powerless.” – Suze Orman
26. “It’s pretty much how we get anything added to the curriculum. When parents said children needed to be computer literate, the schools started responding. The same thing is true of basic financial literacy.” – Elizabeth Warren
27. “Financial literacy begins the process of earning more for what you know and less for what you do.” – Linsey Mills
28. “Financial literacy is an important part of avoiding financial mistakes and planning for a strong, secure financial future.” – Tim Pawlenty
29. “The schools can’t cover all the values that go along with how you handle your money. For example, a financial literacy class might not teach me to hate debt the way my grandmother, Big Mama did.” – Michelle Singletary
30. “Many entrepreneurs struggle to understand payroll taxes, health care and other thorny issues… In other words, they don’t have the financial literacy to scale their businesses and attract investors.” – Daymond John
31. “Financial literacy is just as important in life as the other basics.” – John W. Rogers Jr.
32. “Today the greatest single source of wealth is between your ears.” – Brian Tracy
33. “An allowance is not a salary or an entitlement, it is a tool for teaching children how to manage money.” – Joline Godfrey
34. “Our acts can be no wiser than our thoughts, our thinking can be no wiser than our understanding. ” – George Clason
35. ” Almost any man knows how to earn money, but not one in a million knows how to spend it.” – Henry David Thoreau
36. “The most successful people in life are the ones who ask questions. They’re always learning. They’re always growing.” – Robert Kiyosaki
37. “You don’t have to be great to start, but you have to start to be great.” – Zig Ziglar
38. “Education, leading to financial independence, has surely made women more empowered. – Sudha Murty
39. “A child’s financial lessons aren’t taught. They are experienced through the actions of the parents.” – Linsey Mills
40. “I want kids to understand the importance of savings and investing. It’s crucial that people understand the importance of financial literacy, because it’s actually life-saving.” – Mellody Hobson
41. “Smart people aren’t exempt from professional disasters from overconfidence.” – Charlie Munger
42. “Money is everywhere, it affects all of us, and confuses most of us.” – Morgan Housel
43. “Any fool can spend money. But to earn it and save it and defer gratification — then you learn to value it differently.” – Malcolm Gladwell
44. “Without capitalism and a banker teaching me financial literacy at 9 years old, I wouldn’t be who I am.” –John Hope Bryant
45. “I would rather entertain and hope that people learned something than educate people and hope they were entertained.” – Walt Disney
46. “We need much less than we think we need.” – Maya Angelou
47. “No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.” – Eleanor Roosevelt
48. “The habit of saving is itself an education; it fosters every virtue, teaches self-denial, cultivates the sense of order, trains to forethought and so broadens the mind.” – Thorton T. Munger
49. “Don’t think money does everything or you are going to end up doing everything for money.” – Voltaire
50. “A mistake is a signal that it is time to learn something new, something you didn’t know before.” – Robert Kiyosaki
51. “It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.” – Henry Ford
52. “I love money. I love everything about it. I bought some pretty good stuff. Got me a $300 pair of socks. Got a fur sink. An electric dog polisher. A gas-powered turtleneck sweater. And, of course, I bought some dumb stuff, too.” – Steve Martin
53. “I don’t think it is an exaggeration to say that financial literacy, economic empowerment, and wealth building is going to be the last leg of the civil rights movement. Because one step towards financial literacy takes you two steps towards personal empowerment.” – Russell Simmons
54. “A wise person should have money in their head, but not in their heart.” – Jonathan Swift
55. “With money you can buy a house, but not a home. With money you can buy a clock, but not time. With money you can a book, but not knowledge.” – Unknown
56. “Financial literacy makes it okay for you to make small or big mistakes. On the other hand, being financially illiterate only makes those mistakes dire and regrettable.” – Anas Hamshari
57. “Financial literacy begins the process of earning more for what you know and less for what you do.” – Linsey Mills
58. “I believe through knowledge and discipline, financial peace is possible for all of us.” –Dave Ramsey
59. “I wish that financial literacy was taught when I attended high school, not so long ago” – Charmaine Forde
60. “Teachers are the single most important influence on student success. The qualifications of financial educators have direct impact both on short-term student outcomes and on their long-term financial well-being.” – Vince Schorb
61. “I think people don’t understand compound interest because typically no one ever explains it to them and the level of financial literacy in the US is very low.” – James Surowiecki
62. “Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn.” – Benjamin Franklin
63. “Don’t cut up your credit cards, the problem is not the cards, it’s the lack of financial literacy of the person holding the cards.” – Robert Kiyosaki
64. “Without financial literacy, divorce rates soar, families rupture, and women stay with abusive men for financial security.” – John Hope Bryant
65. “We don’t invest in financial literacy in a meaningful way. We should be teaching elementary school children how to balance a checkbook, how to do basic accounting, why it’s important to pay your bills on time.” – Kabir Sehgal
66. “It’s pretty much how we get anything added to the curriculum. When parents said children needed to be computer literate, the schools started responding. The same thing is true of basic financial literacy.” – Elizabeth Warren
67. “I hope the way you spend your money is in line with the truth of who you are and what you care about.” – Oprah Winfrey
68. “The good news, though, is that all of us can improve the security of our futures through financial literacy. With a better understanding of the basics of finance—how to save, budget and invest—we can increase both our earning potential and our prospects for a solid financial future.” – Reba Dominski
69. “Happiness is not the mere possession of money; it lies in the joy of achievement, in the thrill of creative effort.” – Franklin D. Roosevelt
70. “Learning is the beginning of wealth. Learning is the beginning of health. Learning is the beginning of spirituality. Searching and learning are where the miracle process all begins.” – Jim Rohn
71. “Saying that financial literacy means diversification is just another example of the fox teaching the chickens.” – Robert Kiyosaki
72. “We need to have financial literacy in America, not just complaining about obstructionism. We need solutions. And I think the solutions are using high finance to make capitalism work for people around the world.” – Kabir Sehgal
73. “If you don’t understand the language of money, and you don’t have a bank account, then you’re just an economic slave.” – John Hope Bryant
74. “Many people don’t anticipate the real cost of college when shopping for schools.” – Ric Edelman
75. “All the Perplexities, Confusions and Distresses in America arise not from defects in their Constitutions or Confederation, not from a want of Honour or Virtue, So much as from downright Ignorance of the Nature of Coin, Credit and Circulation.” – John Adams
76. “You know, the old version was about balancing a checkbook. The new version is about the risks of debt, which is so much more widely available. So I think it’s important that we design relevant financial literacy courses, and teach them starting early in grade school.” – Elizabeth Warren
77. “Most people fail to realize that in life, it’s not how much money you make. It’s how much money you keep.” – Robert Kiyosaki
78. “Financial literacy is not an end in itself, but a step-by-step process. It begins in childhood and continues throughout a person’s life all the way to retirement. Instilling the financial-literacy message in children is especially important, because they will carry it for the rest of their lives.” – George Karl
79. ”Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.” – Thomas Edison
80. “Rich people have small TVs and big libraries, and poor people have small libraries and big TVs.” – Zig Ziglar
81. “Getting money will depend 80% on your behavior and 20% on knowledge. Therefore, it’s more about what you do rather than what you know.” – Dave Ramsey
82. “Money is good for nothing unless you know the value of it by experience.” – P.T. Barnum
83. “There is a secret psychology of money. Most people don’t know about it. That’s why most people never become financially successful. A lack of money is not the problem; it is merely a symptom of what’s going on inside of you.” – T. Harv Eker
84. “College graduates spent 16 years gaining skills that will help them command a higher salary; yet little or no time is spent helping them save, invest, and grow their money.” – Vince Schorb
85. “Many people take no care of their money till they come nearly to the end of it, and others do just the same with their time.” – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
86. “Know what you own, and know why you own it.” – Peter Lynch
87. “Financial literacy is an issue that should command our attention because many Americans are not adequately organizing finances for their education, healthcare and retirement.” – Ron Lewis
88. “Financial literacy is the ability to make informed judgments and to make effective decisions regarding the use and management of money.” – National Foundation for Educational Research
89. “It is remarkable how much long-term advantage people like us have gotten by trying to be consistently not stupid, instead of trying to be very intelligent.” – Charlie Munger
90. “We were not taught financial literacy in school. It takes a lot of work and time to change your thinking and to become financially literate.” – Robert Kiyosaki
91. “I learned a lesson which has stuck with me all through the years: you can learn from everybody. I didn’t just learn from reading every retail publication I could get my hands on, I probably learned the most from studying what John Dunham was doing across the street.” – Sam Walton
92. “With a good perspective on history, we can have a better understanding of the past and present, and thus a clear vision of the future.” – Carlos Slim Helu
93. “The secret of his success is that he never went to business school. Imagina all the lessons he never had to unlearn.” – Peter Lynch
94. “You’re faced with financial decisions every day – how to earn it, save it, spend it, and share it. – Ric Edelman
95. “One is not born, with a capacity to make sound financial decisions, it comes through education, reading the right material, and also training. Being promoted to a top position in your organization, or even being elected to public office, does not suddenly endow you with financial literacy, if you did not acquire and develop it, earlier in your life.” – Strive Masiyiwa
96. “Never spend your money before you have earned it.” – Thomas Jefferson
97. “Wall Street people learn nothing and forget everything.” – Benjamin Graham
98. “You only make money when you understand the world correctly and have the psychology to go against the norm.” – James Altucher
99. “By being educated about money you can make better decisions and ultimately have a more secure life.” – Mellody Hobson
100. “These are the well-known paths to success in our system and those that master them or at least understand them, do well in the United States.” (talking about math and financial principles) – Richard Fisher
101. “School typically doesn’t prepare young people for real-life — unless their lives are spent following instructions and pleasing others. In my opinion, that’s why so many students who succeed in school fail in life.” – Ray Dalio
There you go! 101 of my favorite quotes about financial literacy. The good news is that financial success isn’t necessary a goal, but can be series of accomplishments along the path to financial freedom.