Hi, Karthick here 🤝
Coffee and Finance hit your inbox every Thursday, Saturday, and Tuesday with personal finance news.
Our mission is to make 1 million Crorepati’s by 2040.
Let’s learn personal finance with fun.
Sign up below for free
“Like Warren, I had a considerable passion to get rich, not because I wanted Ferraris – I wanted the independence. I desperately wanted it.”
-Charlie Munger
Real Story: A Petrol bunk attendant; Unexpected multimillionaire? How?
On June 2nd, 2014, a 92-year-old man died in Vermont. His name was Ronald Read, and he was a retired janitor and gas station attendant.
When he died, Read’s name was all over the news headlines. Yes, he left $2 million to his two stepchildren and gave $6 million to his local hospital and library.
How did a gas station attendant make this huge fortune? Any magic?
Ronald Read was born in rural Vermont. He was the first person in his family to graduate high school. His life was about as low-key as they come. Read fixed cars at a gas station for 25 years and swept floors at JCPenney for 17 years.
He bought a two-bedroom house for $12,000 at age 38 and lived there for the rest of his life. He was widowed at age 50 and never remarried.
Read died in 2014, age 92. Which is when the humble rural janitor made international headlines. 2,813,503 Americans died in 2014. Fewer than 4,000 of them had a net worth of over $8 million when they passed away. Ronald Read was one of them. In his will, the former janitor left $2 million to his stepkids and more than $6 million to his local hospital and library. Those who knew Read were baffled.
Where did he get all that money?
It turned out there was no secret. There was no lottery win and no inheritance. Read saved what little he could and invested it in blue-chip stocks. Then he waited, for decades on end, as tiny savings compounded into more than $8 million.
This story just demonstrates that wealth-building comes more from saving and investing than from income.
It is easy to become rich from Ronald Read's story. Isn’t?
All we need is discipline.
Previous week Archive