The Elements of Investing by Burton G. Malkiel

IT ALL STARTS WITH SAVING
This is a short, straight‐talk book about investing. Our goal is to enhance
your financial security by helping you make better investment decisions and
putting you on a path toward a lifetime of financial success and,
particularly, a comfortable and secure retirement.
Don't let anyone tell you that investing is too complex for regular people.
We want to show you that everybody can make sound financial decisions.
But it doesn't matter whether you make a return of 2 percent, 5 percent, or
even 10 percent on your investments if you have nothing or too little to
invest.
So it all starts with saving.
It doesn't matter whether you make a return of 2 percent, 5 percent, or
even 10 percent on your investments if you have nothing to invest

I
SAVE
Save. The amount of capital you start with is not nearly as important as
organizing your life to save regularly and to start as early as possible. As
the sign in one bank read:
Little by little you can safely stock up a small reserve here, but not
until you start.
The fast way to affluence is simple: Reduce your expenses well below your
income—and Shazam!—you are affluent because your income exceeds your
outgo. You have “more”—more than enough. It makes no difference
whether you are a recent college graduate or a multimillionaire. We've all
heard stories of the schoolteacher who lived modestly, enjoyed life, and left
an estate worth over $1 million—real affluence after a life of careful
spending. And we know one important truth: She was a saver.
But it can also go the other way. A man with an annual income of more than
$10 million—true story—kept running out of money, so he kept going back
to the trustees of his family's huge trusts for more. Why? Because he had
such an expensive lifestyle—private plane, several large homes, frequent
purchases of paintings, lavish entertaining, and on and on. And this man
was miserably unhappy.
In David Copperfield, Charles Dickens's character Wilkins Micawber
pronounced a now‐famous law:
Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen pounds
nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds,
annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.
Saving is good for us—for two reasons. One reason for saving is to prevent
having serious regrets later on. As the poet John Greenleaf Whittier wrote:
“Of all sad words of tongue and pen, the saddest are ‘It might have been.’”*
“I should have” and “I wish I had” are two more of history's saddest
sentences

The Elements of Investing by Burton G. Malkiel