Andrew Beal quotes: the billionaire banker’s best wisdom.
“Motivation, inspiration, information… get rich quick because life is too short to get rich slow.”
“If people say I’m doing something crazy, that’s usually a good sign.”
“If everybody else is going broke, that simply means your competition is going away.”
“Please structure whatever you do so that only success is rewarded and so that anyone that achieves that success is equally rewarded.”
“Great facilities attract good people.”
“Look for great deals, when you find them, do them, and if you don’t find them, do nothing.”
“Why do people not do the great deals and do all the stupid ones?”
“I’m not that much of a risk taker. I just take situations that people perceive to be high risk, and I decide that they can be managed to low risk.”
“I’m not sure I’d call it taking chances. I think of it as attributing a different level of risk to a problem than the rest of the world attributes to it.”
“My advice is to be careful.”
“It’s hard to sit by and pick your nose when you want to be doing deals.”
“One of our biggest risks is that well-intentioned government actions might improperly tilt the playing field by rewarding or penalizing various competitors, essentially predetermining the winners and losers.”
“My bank’s success has been a philosophy of careful mathematical analysis, to accurately quantify and price risk.”
“All the knowledge, all the answers to questions that we don’t even know to ask – all that will be furthered by what we’re doing. And I like that.”
“You have to work very hard at being disciplined all the time when you underwrite loans so that, when bad times come, you don’t have the worry that you made bad loans two years ago when times were good.”
“I believe in conservative government, and I donated to the candidate who will keep government conservative.”
“I have never had a politician give me my money back.”
“Who in their right mind could ever believe that getting the government involved in health care would make it better or cheaper or more efficient or whatever?”
“This is the opportunity of my lifetime. We are going to be a $30 billion bank without any help from the government.”
“People told me I was crazy.”
“Often wrong, but seldom in doubt.”
“At various stages, I fixed television sets, hawked carnival games and installed apartment buzzers. I always was enthusiastic about jumping into new areas… but never researched very well where I was going to land.”
“I honed my model for finding bargains. I scouted for steeply marked-down properties with problems that seemed fixable. I courted exhausted sellers who wanted out at any price. And I targeted investments where unpopular locations, paperwork hassles or other taints meant that rival bidders were rare. If owners wanted out, they had to work with me. I was such a great negotiator.”
“My plan was to finish college at Baylor, but I got busy starting little businesses and never did.”
“I never earned an MBA or climbed the corporate ladder. I’m a college dropout who has been self-employed my whole career. I bought and fixed up old homes in my 20s, then opened a small bank 16 years ago. Today, I own 100% of Beal Financial Corp., a bank holding company doing business in Texas, Nevada, and California, with combined assets of $7.8 billion and a net worth of more than $1.7 billion.”
“When a San Antonio S&L’s loans went on the block in 1989, I spent a weekend in San Antonio driving past every piece of collateral to make sure that most of the homes were worth their loan balances. Then I bought the maximum allowable number by law of its mortgage loans, at 62 cents on the dollar. The discounted price translated to loan yields of about 15%, and profits surged.”
“I avoid mainstream banking areas, such as credit card and home mortgage lending, in favor of idiosyncratic investments. We do business where no one else wants to. If it’s straightforward, it probably isn’t for us.”
“I just didn’t fit into any box. I was skeptical at first, but I’ve gained a lot of confidence over the years. I have an uncanny ability to sniff out deals.”
“In my lifetime there have been game changers – how can you not be optimistic?”
“I’d like to inspire young people to pursue math and science. I hope many more young people will find themselves drawn into the wonderful world of mathematics.”
“I went to Las Vegas, got interested in playing poker and that’s it. I happen to love rolling the dice sometimes.”
“Playing for such high stakes, though, takes a lot of time, energy and focus. You’ve got to know exactly what you’re doing. It’s a very consuming process to stay good at that level. And I’m trying to do other things and not spend my life thinking about poker.”
“I’m not a mathematician. I’m just a hobbyist. I dabble in number theory.”
“I’m really very conservative.”
“I am a good guy made to look like a bad guy for doing what every taxpayer does – appropriately use the law to minimize taxes.”
“I was always this rebel, this young whippersnapper, up-and-comer. All of a sudden, I’m considered the old fart, rich establishment. But I’m not. I’m a rebel. I’m a rebel finding a cause.”
Related: J. P. Morgan quotes.
