Father's Day Special: More Financial Wisdom from Celebrity Dads

Father’s Day is a great opportunity to celebrate dads and the financial wisdom they share with their kids. In a previous blog, we shared some financial lessons from famous dads, and now we have more to share. Here are some more nuggets of financial advice from celebrity dads.

Whether they are famous or not, dads have a lot of valuable advice to offer. Which of these financial tips from these well-known dads have you followed?

Think for Yourself Ray Dalio is a billionaire investor and hedge fund manager who co-founded Bridgewater Associates, the world’s largest hedge fund. He has also written a book called Principles: Life and Work, where he "shares the unconventional principles that he’s developed, refined, and used over the past forty years to create unique results in both life and business."

One of his principles is to beware of “fast talkers,” or people who can say things confidently and quickly without giving you time to question them. Dalio advises not to be fooled by these people, in life and in finance, and to always think for yourself and make sense of things on your own. This was an important lesson for his son, Paul Dalio, who grew up with a smart and successful father.

Don’t Follow the Herd Jim Simons is another billionaire hedge fund manager and philanthropist who founded Renaissance Technologies, a quantitative hedge fund based in New York. Jim has five children, including his son Nat Simons, who is also a billionaire hedge fund manager and philanthropist who founded Meritage Group, an investment management firm managing over $12 billion in assets.

Nat and his siblings learned a lot from their father about investing. As a mathematician, Jim has always been fascinated by patterns and quantitative models (he is known as the “Quant King”). He taught his children to not follow the crowd and to avoid emotional investing. Instead, he encouraged them to use math and statistics to understand behavior (the basis behind quantitative analysis).

Have Alternative Scenarios George Soros is a Hungarian-American billionaire and the founder of the Open Society Foundations, a grantmaking network that supports civil society groups around the world with the goal of advancing justice, education, public health, and independent media. George has five children, including Jonathan Soros, founder and CEO of JS Capital Management LLC, a private investment firm, and Alexander Soros, chair of the Open Society Foundations.

Soros is known as one of the most unconventional investors, and one piece of financial advice that he gives is to always have alternative scenarios for your investments because the financial markets are unpredictable. He says that you should not get attached to one scenario but have options and change your views as market conditions change.

Save for the Worst, Invest for the Best We can’t talk about famous dads without mentioning Bill Gates, the world’s most famous tech innovator. Bill and Melinda French Gates have three children who have learned financial and life lessons from their parents.

The famous inventor and businessman has given many pieces of great advice over his career, but one that he repeats often is “Save for the worst, invest for the best.” In other words, Gates believes that you can be optimistic about the long run only if you are prepared for the short run. For example, since he started Microsoft, he always kept enough cash in the bank to keep the company alive for 12 months with no revenue coming in. He also was careful not to grow the company too fast.

Statistics show us that things can go wrong but that in the long term, the market tends to move toward progress despite frequent setbacks. Gates understood that if he had his short-term needs covered he could then focus on long-term growth.

These are some more examples of great financial advice from fathers. We are lucky to have so much wisdom from our dads whether they are famous or not.