Back in 1980, our four year old son earned 20 percent interest on a $100 CD from a savings and loan. Our bank wouldn’t offer a CD for anything less than $500.
I’ll bring up this story.
Years in my community (rural Bama), we had a guy who was a carpenter for the county school system. He’d married some gal in 1948, and he built his own house around the 1950-52 era. Never borrowed money, just cashed his paycheck, bought the materials, and kept building a simple two-bedroom place (later bricking it in the mid-60s.
He bought a truck in 1948....kept it til the early 1960s, then buying a second truck. Swapped it in early 1980s, and buy his fourth and last truck around 1999. All paid in cash.
His wife grew just about everything required in life on the farm, and he had around a dozen livestock. His one trip a month to the grocery was mostly for sugar, flour or coffee. No kids. The wife did a lot of canning. Neither the wife or him ever drank Coke or sodas....preferring tea or spring water from the well.
No TV in the house for that entire period, just an old 1940s radio.
In the late 1990s, he retired. His wife ended up with dementia and he tended to her. They passed away within a year or so of each other. The family knew of his passion for never spending much.
The thing is...he put his money in the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s...into CD’s. There were years when it paid fifteen percent. There were lesser years when he made six or seven percent. I admit the late 90s came with marginal rates of three percent.
All of this led the family to meet up at the lawyer’s office after his passing and then progress to the bank...finding out that he had well over a million bucks (I think it was near $1.3 million). I think people were a bit amazed at how much he had....but then you start thinking about his lifestyle, his belief in CDs, and how the CD market worked for guys like him. After retirement, he lived off his meager county school pension check and social security with no issue.