Ronald Read drove a second-hand Toyota Yaris, dressed in worn flannel shirts, and was known to hold his coat together with safety pins. He spent decades working at a gas station and later worked for seventeen years as a part-time janitor at a J.C. Penney in Brattleboro, Vermont.
He read the Wall Street Journal every day and was a regular at his local library. He did not have a financial advisor, a college degree, or a Wall Street connection.
When he died in June 2014 at the age of 92, his estate was worth nearly $8 million. He left $4.8 million to Brattleboro Memorial Hospital and $1.2 million to the town’s Brooks Memorial Library, the largest bequests either institution had ever received at the time. (NBC News, 2014; TODAY, 2015)
His own family was, in the words of his stepson Phillip Brown, “tremendously surprised.“
Read quietly bought stocks for decades, building a remarkably diversified portfolio over time. He eventually owned at least 95 stocks, including Procter & Gamble, Johnson & Johnson, J.M. Smucker, JPMorgan Chase, General Electric, Dow Chemical and CVS Health.
He favored companies and businesses he understood. He reinvested his dividends. And he held many of his investments for years, even decades, through multiple market cycles. (CNBC, 2016; The Big Picture, 2015)
There was no strategy meeting, no pivot, no dramatic moment of insight. There was a man in a flannel shirt, reading the Wall Street Journal, making patient decisions that no one around him could see adding up to anything.
Wealth built slowly produces very little worth showing while it is being built. There is no dramatic before and after. No funding round. No exit. No single milestone that looks particularly significant from the outside.
There is only the long, quiet accumulation of good decisions made consistently across a timeline that many people are not willing or patient enough to hold.
And perhaps that is one reason stories like Ronald Read’s matter.
We are surrounded by the visible moments of wealth: the company sale, the investment that exploded, the property portfolio, the person who seemingly became successful overnight.
We see the outcome because outcomes make a scene. What we don’t see are the years of small, ordinary decisions quietly compounding into something significant
Getting rich slowly is one of the most established paths to building wealth, and one of the least glamorous.
No one is going to congratulate you every month for buying another investment, reinvesting another dividend, leaving the money alone and doing it again. The account does not care whether anyone is watching and that may be the bigger lesson in Ronald Read’s story.
Wealth does not need to look impressive while it is being built.
Sometimes it looks like the same ordinary decision, made over and over again, for an extraordinarily long time.
Start somewhere, regardless. Stay with it long enough to see what it becomes.
Until the next note,
– STB
References:
- NBC News (2014), Vermont ex-janitor bequeaths secret millions to library and hospita
- TODAY (2015), Secret millionaire: Vermont janitor bequeaths fortune to hospital, library
- CNBC (2016), A janitor secretly amassed an $8 million fortune and left most of it to his library and hospita
- The Big Picture / Ritholtz (2015), The Remarkable Life and Investing Lessons of Ronald Read
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