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96-Year-Old Secretary Quietly Amasses Fortune, Then Donates $8.2 Million


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2018 May 7, 7:08pm   1,775 views  6 comments

by RWSGFY   ➕follow (4)   💰tip   ignore  

Spoiler: she did it by buying and holding stocks.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/06/nyregion/secretary-fortune-donates.html

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1   Strategist   2018 May 7, 7:57pm  

Wow. That is something else. I read about an old guy who was so cheap he would sit all day at the library just to save on heating costs. He left $5 million to the library upon his death.
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Goes to show:
1. You don't need lots of money to be happy.
2. Those who are always broke, are broke because they can't handle money. Frugality is the key to building wealth, regardless of how much you make.
2   Ceffer   2018 May 7, 8:21pm  

She followed the investments and stock picks of her lawyer employers. They should all be dug up and indicted for insider trading.
3   RWSGFY   2018 May 7, 8:47pm  

Ceffer says
She followed the investments and stock picks of her lawyer employers. They should all be dug up and indicted for insider trading.


Maybe some of them are not dead yet....
4   Patrick   2018 May 7, 9:22pm  

Her name was Sylvia Bloom and even her closest friends and relatives had no idea she had amassed a fortune over the decades. She did this by shrewdly observing the investments made by the lawyers she served.

“She was a secretary in an era when they ran their boss’s lives, including their personal investments,” recalled her niece Jane Lockshin. “So when the boss would buy a stock, she would make the purchase for him, and then buy the same stock for herself, but in a smaller amount because she was on a secretary’s salary.”
5   just_passing_through   2018 May 7, 10:02pm  

It's awesome she was able to manage her money at that age. That's probably my biggest fear: Losing my mental ability to manage my finances myself.
6   Rin   2018 May 7, 10:11pm  

Patrick says
“She was a secretary in an era when they ran their boss’s lives, including their personal investments,” recalled her niece Jane Lockshin. “So when the boss would buy a stock, she would make the purchase for him, and then buy the same stock for herself, but in a smaller amount because she was on a secretary’s salary.”


What's more important, though no one seems to know it these days, is to re-invest in stocks which provide dividends like Philip Morris, Johnson & Johnson, etc, This is the way to build long term wealth.

Ppl still think of stocks as a cap gains type of casino and thus, we had that entire 2000 Nasdaq 5K event along with 2008, which scared a lot of ppl out of the markets. When companies manage their money well, the dividend players are the place to be long term.

Realize, RJ Reynolds had 11-12% dividends during the worst of that time in 2009. That's an easy few quarters of compounding interest in buying more shares. And then, years later, when the stock recovers, your holdings have just gotten much larger.

Thus, don't get hung up on the stories of getting in on Apple during the early PC era or prior to the iPhone one.

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