When I first read this story on an instagram post (you see, content comes from literally anywhere), it taught me a profound concept: modest income ≠ limited wealth. Let’s dive in.
Ronald Read was born in 1921 into a poor farming family and was in such poverty that he had to walk 4 miles to his high school. He was the first to graduate from his family, and even managed to serve as a military policeman in World War II. He came back after the war ended and he had no job.
He spent the next 25 years working as an attendant and mechanic at a gas station, which he and his older brother somehow managed to purchase and sell in 1979. After a year of ‘retirement’ life, the man was bored or something. He returned to work part time at J.C penny for 17 years.
Surely, he couldn’t have made crazy money. I mean, he worked as a mechanic and part-time janitor at J.C. Penny. However, he used the power of investing. He invested even the small leftover money he had after all expenses, and ended up with, no joke, 8 million dollars when he died. One of his investing ideas was to invest in stocks that offered generous dividends, and what he did with the money is what makes him special; he took the money and reinvested it in additional stock of other companies. For a man with his income, he should have rightfully spent that extra income on something; he could have had so many things to buy. But no, he reinvested. It paid off big time. In about 50-60 years of investing, he had shares of 95 companies, diversifying his stocks and accumulating millions of dollars of wealth.
The aftermath is also worth telling. He split his $8 million net worth as follows: $4.8 million to Brattleboro Memorial Hospital, $1.2 million to Brooks Memorial Library, and $2 million to his family. Imagine hearing Janitor and Philanthropist in the same sentence. It sounds absurd, but that is what good investing can do.