“Only the educated are free” – Epictetus, Greek Stoic philosopher (born into slavery at Hierapolis, Phrygia)

Dear readers, hello:

This week I’m reading: another book about money

I just finished reading The Barefoot Investor by Scott Pape. It’s supposedly the best-selling Australian book of all time. Back in 2018 the Guardian talked about how there was a copy in one in 20 Australian households. (I think to sell a lot of copies of a book you have to go around saying things (and getting journalists at the Guardian to say things) like “did you know there is a copy in one in 20 Australian homes?” ... my copy of the book, a 2022 edition says over two million copies sold… so it’s now probably more like one in 13 Australian households (assuming it’s Australians buying the book, and not Australians from the same households already accounted for in the one in 20 number…. Still a lot of books… my obsession with why some books are best-sellers appears to be growing...)

Anyway how interesting is this:

This reminded me of the introduction to the book I keep talking about… the Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel. (By the way – did I tell you guys the story of the young man holding up a copy of this book to me at the traffic lights in Delhi? You know when you’re in a car, stopped at lights you sometimes have people asking for money, asking to clean your windshield etc.? Well, in Delhi there was a junction where someone went up to cars trying to sell non-fiction books (my kind of salesman!). The guy held up about 5 books to my passenger side window. I couldn't make them all out before the driver shooed him away but one them was The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck by Mark Manson (the bright orange cover unmistakeable), and another was the Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel. If I ever write a book, and an Indian man tries to flog copies of it at the traffic lights in Delhi… wow #goals.

Here's the intro passage from Housel:

My favourite Wikipedia entry begins: “Ronald James Read was an American philanthropist, investor, janitor, and gas station attendant.”

Ronald Read was born in rural Vermont. 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.

For those who knew Ronald Read, there wasn’t much else worth mentioning. His life was about as low key as they come.

Read fixed cars at a gas station for 25 years and swept floors at JCPenney for 17 years. He bought a two-bedroom house for $12,000 at age 38 and lived there for the rest of his life. He was widowed at age 50 and never remarried. A friend recalled that his main hobby was chopping firewood.

Read died in 2014, age 92. Which is when the humble rural janitor made international headlines.

2,813,503 Americans died in 2014. Fewer than 4,000 of them had a net worth of over $8 million when they passed away. Ronald Read was one of them.

In his will the former janitor left $2 million to his stepkids and more than $6 million to his local hospital and library.

Those who knew Read were baffled. Where did he get all that money?

It turned out there was no secret. There was no lottery win and no inheritance. Read saved what little he could and invested it in blue chip stocks. Then he waited, for decades on end, as tiny savings compounded into more than $8 million.

That’s it. From janitor to philanthropist.

A few months before Ronald Read died, another man named Richard was in the news.

Richard Fuscone was everything Ronald Read was not. 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. Former Merrill CEO David Komansky praised Fuscone’s “business savvy, leadership skills, sound judgment and personal integrity.” Crain’s business magazine once included him in a “40 under 40” list of successful businesspeople.

But then… everything fell apart.

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.

Then the 2008 financial crisis hit.

The crisis hurt virtually everyone’s finances. It apparently turned Fuscone’s into dust. High debt and illiquid assets left him bankrupt. “I currently have no income,” he allegedly told a bankruptcy judge in 2008.

First his Palm Beach house was foreclosed.

In 2014 it was the Greenwich mansion’s turn.

Five 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.

Ronald Read was patient; Richard Fuscone was greedy. That’s all it took to eclipse the massive education and experience gap between the two.

Lots more to say on this, and I will do so next week (my brain is not functioning super well today… not sure if you can tell by my writing… I wanted to keep my promise to you guys of getting these newsletters out on a Thursday though, so pushing through!)

Note to self… homework for me:
• Get Scott Pape (the Barefoot investor) on the podcast
• Get Deakin University Emeritus Professor Prof Bob Cummins on the pod (the guy who did the research about the impact of financial control on wellbeing regardless of income level)
• Get someone on the pod to talk to us about Stoicism (see Epictetus quote, would love to have Epictetus himself but he died 2,100 years ago. Ronald Read also not an option for this reason... although more recent death)
• Get Morgan Housel on the pod

Speaking of the pod…

This week on the Growing Up podcast:​
​
​I published two more eps! (both recorded before I went to India)

​Ep. 2 – Bryan Kam: homeschool to Princeton​
​(Writer on the origins of complexity, selfhood, and suffering, philosophy of science, punctuated equilibrium, literature, film)
We talk about growing up in Orange County, Thackeray’s Vanity Fair & Tolstoy's War and Peace, figuring out how to explain to people who you are. Bryan is a very intelligent and very lovely person. He's on twitter @bryankam / substack / patreon and at bryankam.com)

​Ep. 3 – Tonia Kefala Stavridi: Athens to Cambridge​
​(PhD candidate at Cambridge University, cryo-EM of human DNA repair mechanisms and early-stage drug discovery)
​Tonia and I lived together at Cambridge. Her confidence and self-assuredness is inspiring to me. We talk about how she grew up in Athens as an only child to two working parents, with a chain-smoking grandmother who instilled in her the importance of education.

P.S. you can type Growing Up with Delia Burgess into whatever podcast app you use and it should come up :)

This week I’m grateful for: advice on rejection

Earlier this week I was talking about the intense fear I have around rejection, and how it's holding me back from contacting potential podcast guests. (It has held me back from lots of other things previously in life... at one point it was so extreme that I was too scared to ask the cafe I sat in everyday (Popham's in Angel back in the day...) whether they had a toilet I could use... wtf Delia). Bryan Kam (the guy from Ep 2) gave me some great advice which I have fully taken onboard. In fact, it may have cured me. He said "why don’t you turn it around and look for rejections? Make it a challenge. Try to get 100 rejections for potential podcast guests." And I said. What a cool idea. I think I'm going to put this in my newsletter this week.

xx Delia

​Previous newsletters here​

​Forwarded this? Subscribe here​