How DID you or your family get filthy rich?

[WillMagic]

My great-great-great grandfather (I think I'm getting the generation right, maybe one more back) was Lloyd Tevis. Tevis partnered with George Hearst in the Comstock (holla for Deadwood,) and also was a partner in founding Wells Fargo and the San Francisco Chronicle.

My great-grandfather, prior to marrying into the Tevis family, may have made a lot of money playing the stock market prior to the depression. (Short-selling ftw!) He later was CEO of a midwestern natural gas company that is defunct now, but did well in its time.

The money is still around. My progenitors were all shrewd investors without extravagant tastes. It's a good family to be in.

EDIT: The more I read about Tevis the more amazing the guy is. He had a hand in the Southern Pacific Railroad, and he also founded Pacific Coast Oil which would eventually become Chevron Texaco. The guy was a beast.

[gamblore99]

my dad was an accountant. Left and borrowed over a million that he invested in real estate. He lost everything. For 3 years he never took a day off, rebuilding his accounting practice. He was incredibly successful and after just those 3 years he doing 450k in fees.

Then he started doing tax shelters and made several million.

[bobman0330]

My grandfather left his middle-class family in Portugal and immigrated here in 1939. He started washing dishes for a dollar a day. Despite his poor English, he worked his way into waiting tables. Then he was drafted and wounded in France. On his return, he went back to waiting tables. He would work during the dinner shift, and during the day he studied the stock market. Eventually he saved some of his wages and invested. He lost it all. He then saved some more money and invested that, and has been off and running ever since. At present, he's worth $2-3 million. Not too much, but not bad for an uneducated, unskilled immigrant.

[lippy]

I have a cousin that is a lead council at Intel and got stock when he got the job.

I have an uncle that was a lead programmer at QualComm and got 20k-50k worth of stock when he joined the company in the early '90s. God only knows how much he made off that. He got somewhere between 3000-10000 shares at $5-10 apiece... they split into either 8ths or 16ths (can't remember) and the stock price was well over 100 during the tech boom. That being said, I don't have much contact with him and have no idea how rich he is. Could of sold it off for 2m, could still have it, could of made 40m... he doesn't really share details with us. He's cheap too, still buys all his furniture at garage sales.

[Big Bend]

Real estate is nice. My uncle/aunt bought a few hundred acres near Salida Colorado. They split it into smaller lots, added roads and utilities, then sold the smaller lots for mega profit. They're now worth several million. It took a few years and lots of work, dealing with bankers, lawyers, etc... but seems to have paid off nicely.

I'm jealous... BB

[NhlNut]

Inherited a few thousand from my grandmother in 1985. My father decided to take it in stock of the Fifth Third Bank. FITB

When I finally sold the last of it a couple years ago, it had a basis of about $1 a share. Capital gains tax cuts FTW!
Best financial decision he ever made.

[captZEEbo]

not sure what you consider filthy rich, but I'd say I got well off from poker

[BradleyT]

It doesn't matter how they did it as long as they did.

[ QUOTE ]

Ultimately, the real beneficiaries of any wealth transfer will be the grandchildren of today's seniors: Generation Y, those born between 1977 and 1994, who are now in their teens and 20s. It's safe to say few of them have even thought about retirement. Yet in Schervish's projections, they get the biggest slice of the inheritance pie: $17.8 trillion.

Why so much? For all the wealth that the World War II Generation enjoyed, Boomers are even wealthier. Plus, many frugal Boomers will likely let their own inheritance trickle right through to the next generation. Research indicates that Boomers are more willing to pass money to their heirs than their parents were. In a 2001 Allstate Financial survey of 1,004 Boomers, 67 percent said that they planned to have money left at the end of their lives to give their children as an inheritance. Economist Kotlikoff predicts that inheritances will rise to more than 8 percent by 2050 from about 3 percent today, thanks to the Boomers' relative wealth and their purchase of term life insurance. As he concludes, "It is the Boomers' offspring - not the Boomers themselves - who can expect a bequest bonanza."

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[ QUOTE ]
Only a small percentage of Americans will ever receive an inheritance. According to one analysis, just about 7 percent of the population will inherit money - and then typically less than $25,000. A mere 1.6 percent will receive more than $100,000.

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