We all live in an ongoing series of calamities. I don't know of any individual who doesn't have a series of calamities. Life doesn't operate where, you make a certain amount of money, you pay your bills, you move on from day-to-day-to-day. No! What happens is, you make your money, you pay your bills, and then a new bill comes up that's completely unexpected.

We lived in a very modest house. My father drove modest cars, we didn't travel, we didn't do any of the things that, were commensurate with the kind of income that he was making. So we got this kind of, double message, which was, y'know, "You work hard and you make as much money as you possibly can, but you don't spend any money." And you see how well I learned that lesson.

Our own personal salvation is to say, "I'm not going to judge myself, or let other people judge me, by my economic worth." We can't, obviously, control how other people will judge us, but - Life's too short to worry about those things. We can't control those things, but we can control how we feel about ourselves. And we work towards that. To say, "My life has been a success. Even if my bank account doesn't indicate it."

Today, the average family has enough financial reserves to keep going for about three weeks. That's it.

More often than not "fair" and "balanced" may be mutually exclusive

My real problem was certainly decisions I made, and the optimism that I had in making them. Y'know, I mean, I lived within this kind of nimbus of optimism, that, no matter what I encountered, I would always overcome it. Well, optimism can be your worst enemy as well as your best friend, but the other side of this is, that, y'know, expenses grow. But our incomes have not.

Obviously, psychologically, it would make all the difference in the world. But I think it would also make a big difference financially. If people understood, that, "Y'know, having all those things, that I was told I was supposed to have, to be successful, really is not a measure of success, and I can't have them anyway -" Yeah, that would make a big difference. It would've made a big difference, I think, in my life.