There are people out there who thru luck of genes, are born into wealth. Meaning at a certain age they inherit money and will never have to work a day in their life.
Now that doesn’t mean they will live like Bill Gates. I have a neighbor who inherited his fathers home and money and lives a simple life but he is far from “rich”. I think he spends most of his time playing video games and watching tv or seeing friends. He bartends a little for some extra money.
I’d like to ask, do any of you know anyone who basically is set up for life due to family fortunes? If so do they work in some sort of job or charity?
A friend of my wife is in this situation. No regular job, but lives in a luxury high rise. He got a law degree years back but never practiced. He starts up and sells businesses now and then when he’s bored. I think he dabbles in real estate once in a while. I’m not sure how he fills up his day otherwise. He recently got serious about his health and lost something like 300 pounds with diet and exercise, so I guess working out is a big part of his day-to-day. He seems to have a super active social life.
I have a friend who got lucky with a real estate investment he made with his inheritance in his early 20’s and at 72 has finaly run out of money. He has a very modest income from rents but has led a pretty good life traveling and writing mostly.
A friend made a lifetime’s worth of income in selling his equity stake in a small startup. He took two years off to travel and then got a job doing something he enjoys out of sheer boredom. He invests, donates to worthy causes, and lives nice but modestly enough to let the principal grow.
Not exactly born with it, but he would agree that his financial resources are far out of proportion to the work he did in earning them.
a friend told me of a radiocast where the DJ’s spoke of their Native American friends in similar situation. That they received retribution pay from the govt so that they just don’t work! I recall an Anthony Jselnik making a joke about Native American getting all the advantage of going to college for free but still you just don’t see that number in college so there is a connection. If anyone seen the Twillight films (a stretch?) nobody ever mentioned what the tribes did for a living.
I read bios about the last remaining descendants of Abe Lincoln. That the great granddaughter inherited much of Robert Lincoln’s money and basically just travelled and golfed around the world. Guess like a Talented Mr Ripley scenario.
Also a great book that recently came out was Empty Mansions about the billionaire heiress that pretty much just checked out and watched Smurfs and did dioramas in her hospital room (beforehand she dabbled as an art collector)
At least a couple of my college classmates could have lived off ther family wealth for the rest of their lives. They were sons of a couple of the biggest (agricultural) landlords in Pakistan. They came to university with bodyguards.
Both of them became high level executives in major multinationals, after getting graduate degrees from Oxford and the LSE. They are also very involved in charitable work.
Another was the son of a major industrialist. He has been starting one nonprofit or another for the last 25 years. He was a social entrepreneur before that term was coined.
Yet another was part of the “royal family” of a Muslim sect. He started a very successful business (after a couple of failures) and spends a lot of time on social work in their community.
I don’t know anyone born into wealth, but I have a grand-uncle who made a small fortune (a few million) selling a business in my local hometown when he was fairly young. He basically got to retire very early on in life. He owned a big plot of land where he had a huge garden and spent his time basically just keeping the place up.
One guy (never married, no kids) and basically what he does is have fun. Not much charity work (especially where people know his background) because “fortunes are lost too easily like that”. He’s raced cars now and then, did a lot of trap shooting now and then, and has worked what we would basically call Wallmart jobs now and then. Basically he does as he pleases. He knows he’ll have a roof over his head and food to eat even if he lives forever. So what he does tomorrow is entirely up to him.
I know people who have picked up someone (it may be a family member or an employee) to take care of the family’s businesses while they pick up the check. Other than having that check, they live like anybody else: some have businesses, some are stay at home spouses, some work for a living but vacation with the check.
A second group were always keen on being part of the family business. Some were headed for the top, some simply for a job with the family: my college classmates included both the very-hungry heiress of one of the biggest liquor companies in the world, and several others who were set to inherit but who chose Chemical Engineering because “there’s already several cousins studying Law or Business, I figured someone needs to handle the technical side”.
And a third group thought they’d be able to sit at the pool sipping umbrella drinks, only to get a rude awakening at some point. A particularly stupid classmate got lucky in that her younger sister does have the brains to handle the family’s businesses: elder sister gets to be a SAHM to a company middle manager and live in a bigger house than if she didn’t own half the company… no pool, though, and if she wants an umbrella drink she’s got to mix it herself.
I am reminded of another person I know who was in much more of a born with it situation. She is a part of a royal family, though nowhere near the direct line of succession as far as I know.
I worked with her in my undergrad years. She was completing a PhD focusing on better ways to raise certain livestock by tinkering with feeds, acidity of water, and temperature amongst other variables. She was right in there caring for the animals, changing out the disgusting urine-soaked bedding, and sweating it out in the temperature controlled rooms.
She did have advantages - always had enough funding for her research and could live in a decent apartment while other grad students were barely scraping by.
Since earning her degree I have seen her name pop up at a couple conferences and she has been continuing her research. She’s still doing research work on better ways to feed the people.
I’ve known plenty of people with enough family money and connections to be effectively guaranteed a high paying job and relatively high social status. For example, I went to high school with a guy whose family was wealthy and who at one point, owned a large coffee-roasting company (Maximus coffee group). He was pretty much set- although he has to work, he has a lot of capital and a lot of opportunity just within his family businesses. Or plenty of other guys whose fathers were high ranking partners in various law firms, and who basically greased the skids for their sons who became lawyers, either directly within their own firms, or via connections in other firms. Same thing with various other small-medium businesses; more than one person I went to high school with has inherited the family business on their parents’ retirement.
I can’t say I’ve ever known anyone from a family so wealthy that they didn’t have to work at all.
I’ve known a couple of mathematicians born into wealthy families who, nonetheless spent their lives the way I do, as professors, proving theorems and the like. Of course, I wouldn’t have known them otherwise. There is one I know, a philosopher married to a mathematician who is a scion of one of the wealthiest families in the world. He was a socialist and for that reason disinherited and also expelled from the US (in the just post-McCarthy days) and ended up in Canada. Of course, with two professors’ salaries they still ended up very well off.
A computer scientist I know was a founder of SUN and made about $100M there. He continued as a Stanford professor until he could take early retirement at 55 (and still be emeritus). He was Sergey Brin’s thesis advisor and put some venture capital into Google, so maybe he made another $100M, I don’t know. But when I visited him, he lived rather modestly. A large house with a pool, to be sure, but he also ate $4 lunches at a canteen in the basement of the math building. His only visible display of wealth was always picking up the check when a groups of people went out to dinner (I told him the first time, “Had I known you were paying, I’d have ordered the more expensive sushi dinner” and he laughed). Except he once graciously allowed me (i do not mean this sarcastically; he was gracious about it) to pick up the $4 lunches.
On the other hand, my son has a good friend (they go back to first grade and through school) who was a “Microsoft millionaire”. He retired about 1996 or so, under 30, and has done nothing since then. He enjoys movies and goes to a lot of them. He does some traveling; as I write he and his wife and daughter are in Singapore. He manages his investments. He lives in a modest house in Seattle and essentially does nothing. I could not live that way.
I know quite a few. All that I know live relatively ordinary lives and work ordinary jobs, and otherwise live pretty normal lives with a few extras- nicer vacations, better cars, etc. Many that I’ve known have struggled to find their path through life, and are living comfortable but with relatively little direction or ambition.
My college girlfriend. Still investigating different career ideas 35 years later. Her brother went through his money (that took effort) so got his teaching certificate. He doesn’t like to have to work.