Page 12 - Morgan Housel - The Psychology of Money_ Timeless Lessons on Wealth, Greed, and Happiness-Harriman House Limited (2020)

For those who knew Ronald Read, there wasn’t much else worth
mentioning. His life was about as low key as they come.
COBACOBA

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. A friend recalled that his main hobby was chopping firewood.

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.

That’s it. From janitor to philanthropist.

A few months before Ronald Read died, another man named Richard was in
the news.

Richard Fuscone was everything Ronald Read was not. A Harvard-educated

Merrill Lynch executive with an MBA, Fuscone had such a successful career
in finance that he retired in his 40s to become a philanthropist. Former
Merrill CEO David Komansky praised Fuscone’s “business savvy,
leadership skills, sound judgment and personal integrity.”¹ Crain’s business
magazine once included him in a “40 under 40” list of successful
businesspeople.²

But then—like the gold-coin-skipping tech executive—everything fell apart.