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Your Great-Grandkid Is an Idiot.
Published 2 months ago • 4 min read
Here's your weekly helping of interesting investing information and insights.
Opinion
So I'm sitting in bumper-to-bumper rush hour traffic the other day and I'm thinking about Cornelius Vanderbilt and his massive fortune. As one does.
This guy died the richest man in America. We're talking more money than the U.S. Treasury had at the time because of the railroad and shipping empires he built.
And within 50 years of him being in the ground, his descendants had blown through pretty much all of it. By 1973 the family held a reunion — 120 Vanderbilts in one room — and there wasn't a single millionaire among them. Not one!
And it's not just them. According to a Williams Group study, 70% of family wealth is gone by generation two. 90% by generation three.
Think about it... you skipped some vacations. You drove the older car. You ate brown bagged lunches for decades. You invested. You compounded. You did it right. Then you die.
And then some kid you never met — your great-grandkid — uses your money to buy prime real estate in the metaverse.
Every dollar with your name on it when you die is a dollar you delayed forever. Not a year. Not ten years. Forever. You don't get a do-over on that. There's no rerun where you go back and take the trip or drive a nicer car.
Not all, but most people don't respect money they didn't sweat for. And we've seen it. The kid with the Range Rover at 22, the lottery winner broke in five years, the trust fund baby with an expensive drug addiction.
Your great-grandkids probably won't know what it cost you because they weren't there when you said no to the thing you wanted. They didn't feel that.
So I've been chewing on this and here's where I land — why are we saving it for them to spend after we're dead instead of giving it to them while we're alive? Take the daughter to Italy. Pay for the grandkids wedding. Help with the nephews down payment. Fund the cause you actually care about. Watch them open it. See their faces light up.
That's the dividend you actually earned. That's cash flow with a memory attached.
I'm not saying leave nothing. I'm saying don't leave everything. A ladder, not an elevator. Spend some of it on the people you love, with the people you love, while you're still here to see it. Because the alternative might be the latest digital fad.
What Bill Perkins wrote about inDie with zero doesn't mean die with nothing to give. It means give it while it still means something — to them, and to you.
Do you agree with this idea? I'd love for you to hit reply and let me know!
Article I'm Reading
Morningstar.com
A longtime "total return" skeptic at Morningstar (Christine Benz) explains why she now thinks dividend-paying stocks deserve a real seat at the table for retirees, thanks to lower volatility and the psychological comfort of spending income instead of selling shares. [Link To Article]
Professor Scott Galloway was on Diary of a CEO with Steven Bartlett and they talked AI, skills for young people, how young people should start out investing and the best part of becoming a father. Quite the enjoyable and broad reaching interview.
Any Berkshire Hathaway fan or investor will want to check this Acquirers podcast out with Adam Mead who wrote The Complete Financial History of Berkshire Hathaway. They talked about the AGM and if Adam is more or less confident in Berkshire under Greg Abel.
Disclaimer: This is not investment advice. Do your own research before making any investment decisions.
😁THANK YOU to all who responded to the last newsletter!!
And now, here is this week's portfolio activity...
Dividends Received This Week ~$0
None.
Dividends Received 2026 (Schwab Only)~
$1,666.07
Stocks Sold (AVERAGE)
1 Berkshire Hathaway Class B (BRK.B) | $472.10 [There's a chance we'll need to raid the overflow account where this was held to pay for home and auto repairs. We bought it back in the ROTH to "protect" it.]
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