Investing

These Warren Buffett Quotes Will Transform How You Approach Your 30s

24/7 Wall St. Staff

Published: November 28, 2024 8:10 am

Your thirties are a decade of exciting possibilities. Many people are building their careers, starting a family, or pursuing personal passions during this time. Many millennials in their 30s, and older Gen-Zers entering their 30s, remember the idealism we had after graduating from college. But life is expensive, and it’s easy to feel overwhelmed and worried about your future. Fortunately, we’ve got a successful guru with plenty of wisdom to impart: the legendary “Oracle of Omaha”, Warren Buffett.

With an estimated net worth of $149.9 billion, Buffett has managed more money than most people will ever see in their lifetime. But Buffett’s wisdom on investments and relationship-building could be life-changing for people in their 30s as they prepare to tackle these challenges. His emphasis on long-term investing can prepare you for success in the coming years and future decades. Plus, his advice on making good decisions and protecting your reputation reminds our generation that there’s more to life than money (although the money helps). As millennials and GenZers, we’re used to a growing culture of instant gratification: nearly everything we need is right at our fingertips. Buffett reminds us that sometimes, it’s good to take a step back. (These are the dividend monsters that Warren Buffett loves.)

Here, 24/7 Wall St. put together a list of the 12 Warren Buffett quotes everyone in their 30s needs to hear. To do so, we looked at quote websites, read and watched Buffett’s best interviews, and wrote down his tried-and-true advice that has driven us forward. If you’re ready to make a change, see which of these quotes resonates with you.

Why You Need Buffett’s Advice for Life

From humble beginnings in Nebraska, Buffett built Berkshire Hathaway into a multinational conglomerate holding company, which is still based in Omaha. Buffett’s practical investment strategy looks to buy into solid but undervalued companies with the potential to pay off in the long term, not the trendy flavor-of-the-week stocks that draw impetuous investors. This makes him an ideal investment model for 30-somethings who have decades ahead of them to accumulate wealth. But more than investment advice, Buffett is a fountainhead of homespun wisdom applicable to every area of life.

Here are the 12 Warren Buffett quotes for people in their 30s:

1. Don’t Be Risk-Averse With Your Portfolio Ratio

“It is a terrible mistake for investors with long-term horizons — among them pension funds, college endowments, and savings-minded individuals — to measure their investment ‘risk’ by their portfolio’s ratio of bonds to stocks.”

Why is it relevant?

• 30-year-olds still have decades ahead to weather the market’s ups and downs, so they can afford to be less risk-averse in investing.
• Specific investment areas with a long-term horizon for them include retirement and college savings for their children.
• Stocks or bonds can be more or less risky depending on the timeline of the investment and market conditions.

It’s Less Risky to Take Risks

In investing, cautious people sometimes shy away from the stock market out of fear of the risk involved. This can be a wise strategy for people in their 30s who are saving for a big payment in the next few years, such as a downpayment on a house. But since you still have 4o years to go until retirement, a low-risk strategy can also cost you hundreds of thousands of dollars or more in lost capital accumulation in a market that has historically grown and outpaced losses over long timeframes. Suddenly, that cautious approach becomes one of the riskiest things you can do.

Buffett’s advice can also be applied to other areas of life, however. Starting your own business, moving overseas, committing to a relationship, or breaking out of external expectations can feel dangerously risky. Not doing so, however, is more likely to give you the same mediocre gains in your personal life as overly-cautious investing can do for your retirement plan.

2. Your Reputation Matters — Don’t Ruin It

“It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently.”

Why is it relevant?

• As younger people, we sometimes face the temptation to take ethical shortcuts to jumpstart our careers and financial goals.
• People in their 30s might still have some less mature friends who urge them into impetuous and self-destructive behavior.
• Many people are getting married and having children at this age. It’s time to forego immediate gratification to create a stable nest for the family.

Building and Keeping a Reputation

The human brain is wired for the survival of the species. Our brain is still develops until we’re around 25 years old. When we’re younger, our brains function in such a way that we’re more inclined to take risks. Back in the day, that meant hunting a woolly mammoth or trying to win a mate. Today? It’s more along the lines of starting our own businesses. As we age, the brain wiring becomes biased toward more cautious risk assessments, which are entirely appropriate when we have helpless young to protect.

In our 30s, we’re still building a reputation that will be foundational not only for family stability, but also to build trust that will support us in our career and financial ventures. This is the time we need to develop healthy habits and demolish destructive ones. It’s important to surround ourselves with people of honor and integrity who hold us accountable and challenge us to become the best versions of ourselves. And if we do make a mistake, we can own it, make necessary amends, and use it as a learning opportunity.

3. Investing Requires Time More Than Talent

“Successful investing takes time, discipline, and patience. No matter how great the talent or effort, some things just take time: You can’t produce a baby in one month by getting nine women pregnant.”

Why is it relevant?

• Early in our careers and investment plans, progress can seem slow. It can be difficult to stay the course if our plan doesn’t pay off quickly.
• A talented, educated young professional might be disillusioned that no matter their level of effort, results in business and life still take time.
• Young people can be tempted to dilute their efforts into multiple ventures to see which is successful. But maybe it’s better if we just focus on one.

Enjoy the Journey

Patience is not an easy skill to cultivate, but mindfulness can help. Impatience is really just a form of anxiety. We are dissatisfied with our current situation, and perhaps deep inside, we’re uncertain that our plans will be able to change it. However, it’s been said that life is what happens when we’re waiting for things to happen. Whether in finance, relationships, or achieving other life goals, we often look back to the years of struggle as some of the best years of our lives and often find that arriving at the goal can even be something of a letdown. Our lives can feel more satisfying overall when we learn to enjoy the journey.

4. To Invest Successfully, Think Temperament, Not Intellect

“The most important quality for an investor is temperament, not intellect. You need a temperament that neither derives great pleasure from being with the crowd or against the crowd.”

Why is it relevant?

• In our 30s, we’re searching for belonging and may ground our identity by either conforming to or rebelling against a certain group. Neither of these serves us well in investing or other life choices.
• As young investors, we need to make choices based on expertise and wise advice, not as a reaction to a mindless mob.
• Don’t make investments on a purely emotional basis.

The Courage To Go Alone

Buffett credits much of his success to not following the crowd when they react emotionally to market fluctuations — either diving in with both feet or jumping out in terror. By the same token, sometimes a popular stock actually is a good buy, and that is exactly why it is popular. However, the old adage “buy low, sell high” holds true. It takes nerves of steel to make a counter-intuitive move that everyone thinks you’re crazy for. And that is why some people succeed in the market and some don’t.

5. Break Bad Habits Early

“Chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken.”

Why is it relevant?

• Breaking bad habits is always difficult, but it’s easier when we’ve had them for 30 years than when we’ve had them for 70 years.
• Some apparently harmless habits can morph into attitudes that, over time, disrupt many other areas of life.
• The same principle can be used to our advantage, as good habits developed in our 30s may become unconscious good behaviors that can serve us for a lifetime.

Developing Good Habits

James Clear’s Atomic Habits provides excellent advice that aligns with Buffett’s warning about the power of habits. Creating a good exercise habit can be as simple as doing one pushup a day. Even though such a small habit by itself won’t make a measurable effect on health, it establishes the habit of working out. And, as we get older, this is the kind of habit you want to have. Similarly, breaking a bad habit can include substituting a gradually growing good one. And an unbreakable chain of good habits leads to you becoming a winner.

6. Know Your Boundaries

“You only have to be able to evaluate companies within your circle of competence. The size of that circle is not very important; knowing its boundaries, however, is vital.”

Why is it relevant?

• Smart, competent, and educated people who have started experiencing some success might expect their success to carry over into other fields.
• Attention spans have gotten shorter over the years, so it can be hard to stay focused on a narrow range of interests and grow deep expertise in them.
• Investment diversification might be overrated if it distracts you from making the same profits that you could if you kept your investments concentrated in one market sector.

Staying in Your Lane

As someone in my 30s, I’ve seen that most of my friends have gone into fields completely unrelated to their college degrees. But to me, that makes sense. When you’re a well-rounded individual, you want to learn more about many different fields, people, topics, and cultures.

ut this broad general knowledge can also mislead us into thinking we know better than the experts. We’re also living at a time of both profound skepticism and gullibility. We’re becoming conditioned to mistrust authority, even from those who are skilled professionals in their field, and yet we trust the relatively uneducated opinions of friends, celebrities, or our own spotty internet research. When it comes to our investment plan, Buffett believes we do best when we stick to industries we’re quite familiar with and grow our knowledge deeper in those areas. No doubt we’ll also get along better with others and have more credibility when we don’t try to voice opinions in areas we don’t know very much about.

7. Birds of a Feather Flock Together

“It’s better to hang out with people better than you. Pick out associates whose behavior is better than yours, and you’ll drift in that direction.”

Why is it relevant?

• In our 30s, we can start to feel like we are no longer young and fun. This can influence who we choose to spend time with, whether positively or negatively.
• Admitting we need help and can learn from others requires humility, which comes easier for some than others.
• Benefiting from positive influences requires making time to be with them consistently.

Choose Your Mentors Wisely

In a martial art like jiujitsu, grappling only with beginning white belts can be quite gratifying. You’ll get tons of submissions and feel like the best martial artist in the gym. But you won’t get better. You’ll keep making the same mistakes in technique with no one to show you how easily you could be swept and submitted by someone who knew what they were doing. You get better at jiujitsu by rolling with higher belts. Sure, you’ll be the one getting submitted, again and again. But you’ll learn, and eventually swap your own white belt for a blue one, and beyond. In life, you’ll only improve in the areas that are important to you when you have someone who is knowledgeable, skilled, and forthright enough to show you what you’re doing wrong and teach you better ways to do it.

8. Don’t Bet Against the U.S.

“For 240 years, it’s been a terrible mistake to bet against America, and now is no time to start.”

Why is it relevant?

• A lot has happened in our lifetime: 9/11, the COVID-19 pandemic, multiple wars, the impact of climate change, and increasing gun violence. In our 30s, we may feel pessimistic about the country’s future. But this can cause us to underestimate some of the opportunities we have.
• With more life experience through multiple crises, we have the ability to develop a more zen attitude about the calamity of the week.
• Underestimating the United States can cause us to make unnecessarily risky investments in international markets and currencies.

Because It’s A Safe Bet

Polls of Millennials and Gen-Zers generally show that we’re more likely to be pessimistic about the future and the fate of the United States than older generations. The country has been through a revolution and civil war, national expansion, depressions and recessions, two World Wars, and a Cold War that very nearly ended the world. In comparison, the aggravation, economic malaise, and flagging confidence in 21st-century America look like a case of the blahs. If history is any indication, the country will continue to experience ups and downs, life will go on for most people pretty much the same regardless of who is in Washington, and the stock market will continue rising. The people who will miss out on America’s opportunities are those who panic and write it off too quickly.

9. You Can’t Buy Love

“The only way to get love is to be loveable. It’s very irritating if you have a lot of money. You’d like to think you could write a check: ‘I’ll buy a million dollars’ worth of love.’ But it doesn’t work that way. The more you give love away, the more you get.”

Why is it relevant?

• Growing up in a generation where capitalism and consumerism reign king, many of us have tried to impress others with possessions. This may not attract the kind of person we would like to spend our lives with, however.
• If we build workaholic habits as young people, we can find that love withers for lack of time and attention.
• Young parents might consider that more time spent with their children would benefit them more than working overtime to leave them an inheritance.

How Loveable Are You?

Who do you love, and why? Do you love your grandma because she drove a nice car or because she hugged you and told you how much she loved you? What about your dog? Did your dog have to have a pedigree and know how to run an agility course, or basically just look at you adoringly and act excited when you come home? It’s pretty easy to love people who love us and show it. So the way to be loved is not only to be loveable, but to be loving. Let other people feel like they are the most important thing in the world to you, and you will become one of the most important things in the world to them.

10. Don’t (Always) Trust the Algorithm

“Beware of geeks bearing formulas.”

Why is it relevant?

• Technology-driven approaches to investing can appeal to young people. We’re computer-savvy, and the advent of AI has changed our ability to get answers at our fingers. But remember — this technology and these algorithms may be inaccurate.
• Trusting experts can feel reassuring when our experience is limited, but it is no substitute for taking charge of your own decisions.
• It’s worth considering whether the people we are trusting are who we want to model our lives after.

Theory or Reality?

One of the most basic truths in computing is “garbage in, garbage out.” The most sophisticated computer models in the world will yield junk results if they are based on faulty assumptions or bad data. Plus, people are not as impartial and predictable as they like to think they are. Human error and individual bias at any stage of managing data can skew the outcomes and recommendations in a direction that honestly “doesn’t compute” in the real world. The answer? Treat sophisticated data models as important pieces of information but not as the definitive answer. Investing is both an art and a science.

11. Simple Behavior Can Beat Complex

“The business schools reward difficult, complex behavior more than simple behavior, but simple behavior is more effective.”

Why is it relevant?

• Having learned a lot of theory in college, people in their 30s might now find that some of what they learned is impractical in the real world.
• Being open-minded to learning from people with practical life experience is an important part of our continuing education.
• Relationship issues that also seem highly complex might benefit from focusing on simple fundamentals.

The Gift of Simplicity

Albert Einstein once commented that you don’t truly understand a subject yourself until you can explain it in simple terms your grandmother would understand. Such a simple, straightforward way of understanding and explaining any number of things in your own life is necessary for a couple of reasons. It helps you stay clear on what you are pursuing, why, and how. It also helps you win support from it, whether from investors or family and friends. Ultimately, a clear, simple understanding will lead to a clear, simple plan you can stick to through the years.

12. Our System is Set Up For Success

“There are 309 million people out there that are trying to improve their lot in life. And we’ve got a system that allows them to do it.”

Why is it relevant?

• Some people blame others for their own lack of success. It’s important to remember our system can be a win-win.
• With so many individuals finding new avenues for self-improvement, we have plenty of examples to learn from.
• The desire for self-improvement creates a point of commonality that can connect people in their 30s with others of all ages and skills.

Making Your Opportunities

A capitalistic system, in theory, creates the conditions that will enable anyone to work their way up from the bottom. Of course, in practice, opportunity is not equal. Some people inherit money, are born into a social class and family situation that opens doors for them or have strings of good fortune that other people don’t experience. At the same time, many of the greatest success stories are from people who overcame adversity. In fact, difficult circumstances can be the crucible that forges the resilience and determination that are key to success. Regardless of circumstances, we can look at our resources and figure out how to maximize them to create our own opportunities.