Morgan Housel: The Investing Expert’s “System” for Stress-Free Wealth

**Dave Meyer** (0:00)
Morgan Housel, the best selling author of The Psychology of Money, Same as Ever, and The Art of Spending Money didn't get wealthy by chasing huge investments, making genius stock picks, or building a 100 unit rental portfolio. Instead, he used a simple system for building wealth that's not only easy, but repeatable by everyone hearing this right now. It allowed him to reach financial freedom with less stress and more free time without the burnout. In fact, Morgan even says that working more could be counterproductive to what you're actually trying to achieve. Today on the show, we're getting access to this system, which you can directly apply to your own investments in real estate or any other asset class. Plus, Morgan shares a strong opinion at the end that every real estate investor needs to hear.
What's up, everyone? I'm Dave Meyer, Chief Investment Officer at BiggerPockets. Today's guest on the show is a special one. It's bestselling author, Morgan Housel. I am personally a huge fan of his books. Reading The Psychology of Money absolutely changed how I think about building wealth, so I am super excited to share this conversation with Morgan, with all of you. Let's bring him on.
Morgan, welcome to the BiggerPockets Podcast. Thanks for being here.

**Morgan Housel** (1:26)
Thanks so much for having me.

**Dave Meyer** (1:27)
Yeah, I'm excited for you to be here. I'm very excited that you're going to be joining us at BPcon this year as our keynote speaker, because honestly, I've learned a lot from you, and I think you have so much value to add to the BiggerPockets community. Maybe you could start by just telling us a little bit about yourself. You've become one of the most preeminent thought leaders in the financial investing space. What drew you to this space in the first place?

**Morgan Housel** (1:52)
No, it was very much an accident. It was never part of the plan. It was never part of a plan to become a writer. And even once I was a writer, it was never part of the plan to write about the topic that I do now.
I graduated college in 2008 and I wanted to be an investment banker or a hedge fund manager. That was the plan. I see 2008 was like a nuclear explosion in the financial world. Not a good time to be looking for a banking job. And then so out of desperation and nothing more than that, I stumbled haphazardly into a job as a writer for The Motley Fool.
And I did not want to do it. I was not excited about doing it. I was not proud of becoming a writer at the time. It was not where I saw my career going. But frankly, I had rent to pay. I needed to do something. And in 2008, that was the only finance job that I could wrap my hands around and that I had. And so I became a writer in 2008, which obviously was a very interesting time in the world.
When I started as a Motley Fool writer, I was assigned the banking sector to cover. And I forget the exact numbers, but it was something like at the beginning of 2008, I had 16 banks to cover. And by the end of 2008, only like seven of them were still alive and still around.
And so I spent those first couple of years, let's call it 2008 through 2012, let's say, trying to answer the question like, what the heck happened in 2008? It seemed like such a very important question to answer. And B, it should have been an easy question to answer. And as the years went on, it was like, oh, it's not easy at all. And the reason it wasn't easy is because there was nothing in a finance textbook or in an economics textbook that would explain why 2008 happened. Like just wasn't really there. But as I started like peeling it back and reading other people and figuring out, it was like, oh, there's nothing in an economics textbook that will explain it, but psychology explains it. Sociology explains it. Political science explains it. Biology explains it. Like evolution explains it. There's all these fields that had nothing to do with investing or money. They were like, oh, like if you want to understand why people keep up with the Joneses and bury themselves in mortgage debt, don't read a finance textbook. Read a sociology textbook. It talks all about it. Like it's all right there. And so that to me was just like, oh, if I want to understand markets and finance and money, I need to think about this not through a finance lens, but through a behavioral psychological lens.