The Millionaire Secretary
Posted by admin on April 26th, 2010
An article in the Chicago Sun-Times (“The Millionaire Next Door”; March 31, 2010) reported that Grace Groner passed away in January at the age of 100. What was unexpected was that she left $7 million to her alma mater. How could someone who was orphaned at age 12, attended college, was cared for by neighbors, and spent 43 years as a secretary for Abbott Laboratories in Chicago manage to amass this amount of wealth? It’s simple…with a little bit of luck, the turtle wins the race every time. Specifically, she never married, never owned a car, always walked and bought her clothing on sale, and lived for much of her life in an apartment before moving to a small one bedroom house which was willed to her by a friend.
Her $7 million estate was a product of a lifetime of simplicity, living below her means, and some luck. She had purchased three shares of Abbott stock for $60 each, reinvested the dividends, and never sold them over a 75 year period which included the shares splitting many times over these seven decades. These shares lost almost one-third of their value in the bear market of 1937, for example, and did not exceed the mid-$50 share of March 1937 until March 1944. She continued to hold her shares despite plunging prices in 1962, 1970, 1074, 1982, 1987, 1990, 2002, and 2008.
So, am I encouraging you to pick one stock and blindly hold it forever? Heck no! I just wanted to illustrate to you the power of buying world dominating companies with a historical record of increasing their dividend payments because the idea of compounding could be the key to you ultimately making a fortune.
-Samir