Ronald Read was patient Richard Fuscone was greedy. In 2014 it was the Greenwich mansion’s turn.įive months before Ronald Read left his fortune to charity, Richard Fuscone’s home-where guests recalled the “thrill of dining and dancing atop a see-through covering on the home’s indoor swimming pool”-was sold in a foreclosure auction for 75% less than an insurance company figured it was worth.³ “I currently have no income,” he allegedly told a bankruptcy judge in 2008.įirst his Palm Beach house was foreclosed. High debt and illiquid assets left him bankrupt. It apparently turned Fuscone’s into dust. The crisis hurt virtually everyone’s finances. In the mid-2000s Fuscone borrowed heavily to expand an 18,000-square foot home in Greenwich, Connecticut that had 11 bathrooms, two elevators, two pools, seven garages, and cost more than $90,000 a month to maintain. Former Merrill CEO David Komansky praised Fuscone’s “business savvy, leadership skills, sound judgment and personal integrity.”¹ Crain’s business magazine once included him in a “40 under 40” list of successful businesspeople.²īut then-like the gold-coin-skipping tech executive-everything fell apart. A Harvard-educated Merrill Lynch executive with an MBA, Fuscone had such a successful career in finance that he retired in his 40s to become a philanthropist. Richard Fuscone was everything Ronald Read was not. From janitor to philanthropist.Ī few months before Ronald Read died, another man named Richard was in the news. Then he waited, for decades on end, as tiny savings compounded into more than $8 million. Read saved what little he could and invested it in blue chip stocks. There was no lottery win and no inheritance. In his will the former janitor left $2 million to his stepkids and more than $6 million to his local hospital and library. Fewer than 4,000 of them had a net worth of over $8 million when they passed away. Which is when the humble rural janitor made international headlines.Ģ,813,503 Americans died in 2014. A friend recalled that his main hobby was chopping firewood. He was widowed at age 50 and never remarried. He bought a two-bedroom house for $12,000 at age 38 and lived there for the rest of his life. Read fixed cars at a gas station for 25 years and swept floors at JCPenney for 17 years. His life was about as low key as they come. He was the first person in his family to graduate high school, made all the more impressive by the fact that he hitchhiked to campus each day.įor those who knew Ronald Read, there wasn’t much else worth mentioning. My favorite Wikipedia entry begins: “Ronald James Read was an American philanthropist, investor, janitor, and gas station attendant.”
Ordinary folks with no financial education can be wealthy if they have a handful of behavioral skills that have nothing to do with formal measures of intelligence. And behavior is hard to teach, even to really smart people.Ī genius who loses control of their emotions can be a financial disaster. The premise of this book is that doing well with money has a little to do with how smart you are and a lot to do with how you behave. You may wonder how long this behavior could last, and the answer was “not long.” I learned years later that he went broke. And don’t ever insult me like that again.” “You want five hundred dollars?” the executive asked incredulously, while pulling a brick of cash from his pocket and handing it to the manager. A manager told him it was a $500 lamp and he’d have to replace it.
Just for fun.ĭays later he shattered a lamp in the hotel’s restaurant. They then proceeded to throw the coins into the sea, skipping them like rocks, cackling as they argued whose went furthest. One day he handed one of my colleagues several thousand dollars of cash and said, “Go to the jewelry store down the street and get me a few $1,000 gold coins.”Īn hour later, gold coins in hand, the tech executive and his buddies gathered around by a dock over looking the Pacific Ocean. He bragged openly and loudly about his wealth, often while drunk and always apropos of nothing. He showed it to everyone who wanted to see it and many who didn’t. He carried a stack of hundred dollar bills several inches thick. He also had a relationship with money I’d describe as a mix of insecurity and childish stupidity. He had started and sold several companies. He was a genius, having designed and patented a key component in Wi-Fi routers in his 20s. One frequent guest was a technology executive. Ispent my college years working as a valet at a nice hotel in Los Angeles.
Is macdrive 10 from mediafour a scam full#
“The world is full of obvious things which nobody by any chance ever observes.” “A genius is the man who can do the average thing when everyone else around him is losing his mind.” Postscript: A Brief History of Why the U.S.
0 kommentar(er)
