I will tell this story because I actually knew the guy from youth growing up.
Local guy...carpenter, graduated from school around 1949. He ended up as a carpenter for the school system in Alabama. Married his high school sweetheart. He got a used truck for the first couple of years.
He built his own house....small place. Small farm operation, with a garden. The wife planted everything, and they bought little to nothing at the grocery.
He got into CDs in the early 1960s. He and the wife never had kids. Most everything they ate...came from the garden or farm. He paid cash about every fifteen years for a new truck.
Throughout the 1960s and 1970s....CDs were booming away, sometimes getting 10-percent growth. He kept on with the practice in the 1980s, and retired in the 1990s. No TV, just a radio in the kitchen. The tractor on the farm was the same one that he’d bought int the early 1960s.
He passed away around six years ago...his wife had dementia and died around four months later. Relatives went down with the will business and the bank opened up the CD collection. He was about $25k short of a million dollars. This is a guy who wore overalls 365 days out of the year, bought only with cash, ate mostly all from the garden (except for coffee and sugar), and hadn’t watched an hour of TV in his entire life. Never spent any of the bulk of this money on much of anything.
But was he happy, man?
Sounds like my neighbors when I was a kid in the 60’s. They had a small dairy farm and all his tractors were the hand-cranked type; he purchased them in pieces at an auction and put them all together himself. He earned the money to buy the farm during WWII; he was a Marine in the Pacific island-hopping campaigns and was quite the poker player.
My story about the guy I know.
He never worked for anybody but himself, had a number of businesses as a fashion photographer, audio equipment designer, recording engineer, then owned a large photographic processing plant. Sold his last business for 2 or 3 million in 2003, bought a lot of Apple, Google, and Amazon.
Mmmm I’m gonna buy what I want. Not gonna scrimp and save so that my kid gets it all. I’ve already told her that.
I wouldn’t scrimp and deny myself to die rich. What’s the point?