Credit cards are like snakes: Handle 'em long enough, and one will bite you.
Interpretation
Credit cards can lead to financial trouble if mismanaged.
This quote by Elizabeth Warren uses the metaphor of snakes to illustrate the dangers of credit cards. It suggests that while credit cards can be useful financial tools, improper handling or over-reliance on them can result in negative consequences, akin to getting bitten by a snake after handling it for too long.
In practice
When discussing responsible financial habits at a seminar.
Families rely on financial services more than ever, but those who need them most - who struggle to make ends meet - too often must contend with sky-high interest rates and tricks and traps buried in the fine print of their loan products.
There's been such a sense that there's one set of rules for trillion-dollar financial institutions and a different set for all the rest of us. It's so pervasive that it's not even hidden.
Mitt Romney is the guy who said corporations are people. No, Governor Romney, corporations are not people.
I talk to nurses and programmers, salespeople and firefighters - people who bust their tails every day. Not one of them - not one - stashes their money in the Cayman Islands to avoid paying their fair share of taxes.
'Middle class' used to be synonymous with secure, with steady, with boring, because middle-class people were people who were pretty much safe from the time they first started work on through retirement and until their deaths. No longer.
Does anyone believe that Goldman Sachs is gonna give up a deal that would yield millions of dollars because someone fussed at them behind closed doors?
Have rational expectations for future returns and avoid changing those expectations in response to the ephemeral noise coming from Wall Street.
There's so much disagreement about investing, and it's because nobody really knows.
There will always be bull markets followed by bear markets followed by bull markets
Regardless of what happens in the markets, stick to your investment program. Changing your strategy at the wrong time can be the single most devastating mistake you can make as an investor.
Earnings don't move the overall market; it's the Federal Reserve Board... focus on the central banks, and focus on the movement of liquidity... most people in the market are looking for earnings and conventional measures. It's liquidity that moves markets.
If investing is entertaining, if you're having fun, you're probably not making any money. Good investing is boring.
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