To give an idea of the value and wealth unleashed by the breakup, in 1911, John Rockefeller was worth an estimated $200 million ($4.6 billion in 2010 dollars). Just two years later he was worth $900 million ($19 billion in 2010 dollars). When he died (during the second dip of the Great Depression in 1937) his net worth was $1.4 billion ($21 billion in 2010 dollars).
Sil - I couldnt buy 100 pounds of gold now. thats at least 100161700=2.7 millon dollars, and thats figuring 16 on. to a pound which I dont think a “troy” ounce is.
Good, where do I store the shares for so long, and how do I legally claim that I am the rightful owner of the shares 100 years later? (i gotta cover all my bases here).
Alot of these answers bring up the question - How do I prove I own this land, painting, shares, whatever after 100 years? I mean, its would be big news that all the sudden this guy is filthy rich, and many questions would be asked and probably thoroughly investigated. Of course, us future time-travelers cant admit to it.
Investment account placed in trust.
Lots (and I mean LOTS) of underpants.
Sorry man, not much of a banker here. dont i have to place someone in charge of a trust? and after say 40 years, maybe 70 isnt someone gonna say, “hey, we have millions of dollars that belong to noone” and probably take legal action to “get” my investment?
Put the bank in charge of the Trust with specific instructions to reinvest the dividends and to keep it all in the Standard daughters and their successors (sp). Tell them (put it in writing) that the Trust will be claimed in 100 years by somebody who is assigned a specific number by the US Government (which, of course, will be your Social Security #). You may wish to put three pieces of identification in the document and say that the bank must release the trust to anybody who can provide two out of three pieces of identification (think of it as logging into your bank account online - you need security questions, so come up with some. For example, “What’s your mother’s name?” and then answer with a name that nobody will call their mom for a hundred years - given the day, something like “Nakesha” or “Aaliyah” would thwart any guessers). This would avoid any possibility that Future-You is assigned the wrong social security #, preventing you from accessing your assets.
Put writing in the agreement that if the Trust is not claimed within 150 years, to transfer the assets to the Red Cross. Since you have 100 years of post-1911 history behind you, pick a bank you know will be around like First National City Bank or JP Morgan. Hell, you can give the trust specific advice that the bank will be legally obligated to follow:
- In 1955, buy a lot of Xerox. Sell in '59
- In 1971, invest $100k in Wal Mart
- In 1984, invest in the Microsoft IPO
Stuff like that.
Also, hire a legal firm, separate from the bank, to protect your assets. Have the trust pay the legal firms retainer and expenses as they accrue.
Seriously, this isn’t that hard to do.
Sure it’s easy to do, but for us non-lawyer types, it also seems pretty easy for bankers to screw people, contracts or not. In the above case, I can see the bank arguing, say in 1940, that whoever gave those instructions was clearly insane, since there are no such companies, so the best thing for his heirs is to let the bank direct the trust’s investments, for a 10% fee, of course.
The obvious (well, to me, anyway) solution to that is to put the investment orders in sealed envelopes, with instructions that they be opened on specific dates. The envelopes could even be left with the legal firm you hired to prevent the bank from knowing about them beforehand.
Precisely.
Another thing I didn’t mention is that a Trust has to have a beneficiary. So you will have to decide who/what that will be, and to make sure that the institution will be around for 100 years. College endowments are an easy one (Harvard, Stanford, Yale, many of the large State schools (U. of GA, U. of MI) are around at that time), as are groups like the Boy Scouts (founded 1910).
I don’t really get this. The bank wouldn’t be able to make these arguments until the dates have passed. And the bank would still be legally obligated to invest as directed in the Trust because there is a contract, i.e., the Trust document itself.
This was actually the plot of the book Replay. The main character finds himself suddenly transported back to his 18 year old body after a heart attack at 44 (iirc). All his experiences and memories are intact. He has to use his memory of events to make money during his “replay” of his life. One memorable scene is his wife angrily demanding “You invested our savings account in a guy named Wozniak who’s building a WHAT in his garage?”.
I’ve probably messed up the actual dialogue, as it’s been decades since I read the book. I recommend it though, it’s pretty entertaining.
First, I’d research where I could make a relatively large amount of money in 1911 with 2011 knowledge. Then, I’d go back and make that money, then I’d go and buy the mineral rights (or as much as I could) to the East Texas oil field and West texas oil fields (should be cheap; neither was discovered by then), and set up trusts, etc… such that any and all money made goes into these trusts for me in 2011.
Essentially, I’d try to set things up so that I’d skim and invest some percentage of most all of the oil recovered from Texas during the 20th century.
I guess what people are disputing is the likelihood that the trust and its millions would be waitng for you 100 years later if you were not there to defend it. Plenty of presumably legal contracts are broken under the weight of legal assaut, and unless you are willing to defend them, you will lose everything, especially when billions of dollars are at stake.
Benjamin Franklin set up a trust that was active two-hundred years after his passing. It was finally dissolved in 1991, as per his instructions.
http://www.wccf.net/benfranklin.htm
IANAL, but I don’t see any reason why one couldn’t do the same today (or in 1911).
I think this is the only post that has faced the problem of how to bring money back. It won’t do to bring back current $100 bills. They are the wrong size (the old bills were the size of IBM cards, in fact the Hollerith cards were the size they were so Hollerith could used bill sorting machines) and have dates like 2005 on them. Perhaps you could find someone with a cache of bills in his mattress. I know a Russian who found such a cache of 100 $100 bills in his grandmother’s mattress. He took them to the local US consul (in St. Petersburg) and they gave him $10,000 in crisp new hundreds. Of course, they had lost well over 90% of their buying power, but them’s the breaks. If you could find something like, you are golden. Otherwise, you are pretty much restricted to something like gold. Maybe diamonds, but they would have to be cut in some old-fashioned way. Or uncut. Maybe that’s the best combination of weight and value.
Another possibility. Find out which postage stamps from 1911 are now rare and valuable. Buy as many as you can. Find out where your current back yard is. Do a real accurate survey. Go there and put the stamps (unhinged, uncirculated, really well-wrapped 10 feet underground) and return to present.
Open a 100-year term cd with as much money as I could carry. Open a bank account with a bank that’s still around today, and let it sit there earning interest (would this work if I told them to note that account taht the interest might keep accruing for a very long time before a withdrawal would be made? would they close out the account due to inactivity?). Or whatever stocks were available in 1911 and are booming today.
Rather than fooling around with gold wouldn’t it be easier to print out some counterfeit old-timey currency using a modern printer, which you then spend in the past? Sure they’re crude by today’s standards, but I can’t imagine they had very sophisticated anti-counterfeiting measures back in 1911. Google “national bank notes” and you’ll get some good images to work with.
The only hitch to this scheme is they used the same linen paper in currency then that they do now, which you’ll need to find a way to fake. But hey, since you already invented time travel, that shouldn’t be to big of a problem to solve, now would it?