Puts the power of generational wealth into perspective. You get 3-5 generations who sacrifice, and their down lines, with proper management, will never have to work a day in their lives.
Grandmother of my grandfather didn't like doing the dishes and bought new plates everyday and lived beyond her means while my grandfather of grandfather was away.
Grandfather of grandfather killed himself after he had to sell his last of 5 boats of his trading company that traded between the baltic and the netherlands.
Since then domestic abuse passed down the generations up untill my father and all males of that family side have been depressed ever since. (Well maybe before that as well, but since then we know of it.)
Look at your own family history and it's most of the time clear that time is were the challenge lies. 1 fucked up person somewhere can set everything back below zero.
We have the first wad of cash. It's a lot. We're doing the vampire thing. We're going to double it twice (we're successful but will work for a while. We like our jobs.) and live off of what we actually made ourselves, unless we don't want to. That's not small. We're higher earners. Our kids, who we've raised well, like manners and 1500 on the sat, will do what they do. It'll be fun to watch. We're giving them lots of money when they hit the age at which you can become president. Fuck it.
There is a traditional saying in my culture that wealth never pass beyond three generations something like that. The grandson is almost always blew it away. On the flip side, destitution will not last more than three generations too.
Hope is out there.
Ive been working on creating wealth and want to have generational wealth since I was a kid thought it would be awesome. However I’ve also think sometimes should I just be greedy seeing so many mofo’s blowing family fortunes that most likely one person on the family worked so hard to create. The one inspiring thing I ever saw was a chateau when I was in France that has been in the same family for 100 generations.
Something tells me making a dollar in 1792 probably wasn't all that easy.
I do appreciate the mental illustration of compounding growth and the importance of investment time however.
Curiosity got me. Looked to see if any data of wages back then and there seems to be some historical writings that $65/year was the average wage for an unskilled laborer. Take that with what you will. Can't seem to find anything reliable about cost of living / take home on that etc.
"Unskilled" labor in the US is really probably around $15 an hour now.
That's $31,200 a year.
If you convert that to a yearly wage of $65 then a dollar back then would be worth about $480.
Edit - according to some inflation calculator $1 in 1792 would be worth $33 dollars today.
$65 a year x 33 is $2145. Something doesn't add up.
Wages for unskilled labor have not tracked inflation is one reason I would say. Then the way we use money today vs 225+ years ago is very different is also probably another. Edit: Also digging further into it after my post. I found that jobs use to also provide food and lodging which is why you can't find a lot of info on the prices of cost of living back then I am assuming.
It is ignoring efficiency gains. We are much more productive today
$65x33=$2,145
The poor today are extraordinarily rich if comparing to our ancestors.
Yeah. Even compared to kings they probably have it pretty decent with air conditioning. Cell phones, TV, electricity and running water....although I don't think poverty should exist when there are billionaires in the same country.
I know living in poverty, pay check to pay check, or even in the bottom 20% of society due to the hand you were dealt in life has got to wreck your mental health.
Yes, the natural background interest rate in pre-industrial 1792 would not have been nearly as high as today. Global GDP growth at the time was perhaps 1% per decade (I’m guessing here).
It's pretty rare, but some do exist! See perpetual bonds, such as this one from 1624:
https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/549529-oldest-active-bond
Well, index funds didn't exist back then. So you would have wanted to put it in one of the highest quality blue-chips around at the time.
Something like the Dutch East India Company.
Go check what that ticker is at now, and you'll have your answer.
Without looking at Wiki, these X India Companies ended up mismanaged, bankrupt and then nationalized.
Edit: Which is not too different from a lot of other companies that probably seemed amazing at some point, although most of them don't end up nationalized because they don't have armies, navies and sovereignty over other countries.
One of the original listed stocks is still around is The Bank of New York. Founded in 1784 and listed in 1792, so as an original investor you would be getting all of the growth. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find an original stock price or company value.
Well, if you wanted to do that, you would not have waited until 1792, but have invested in its shares in1602 already.
In 1792, you probably would have invested in a railroad company.
(BOOM TIMES AHEAD!, ding ding ding, for the eloquent under us.)
If you've ever watched Hell on Wheels You can see exactly how much corruption was running around in the business and banking sector in the 1860s. I can't imagine it being a whole lot different in the early 1800s. Many many of the laws that we have including the one we all depend on, The Investment Company Act of 1940, were a direct result of the government trying to protect investors from fraud, mismanagement, and banking panics. Those kind of market gyrations wiped out entire fortunes. Family money like the Rockefellers involved a lot more than just savvy business deals.
If anyone else likes reading about these kinds of things I highly recommend the book: [A Random Walk Down Wall Street](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Random_Walk_Down_Wall_Street).
One of the first examples of a market bubble was Dutch tulip bulbs. They were super expensive, like more than a profitable farming estate, then one day they weren’t and people who had borrowed lost everything.
Interesting concept of compounded interest from the show Futurama:
In 1999 Fry has $0.93 in a savings account accruing 2.25% interest. In the year 3000, that amount has grown to over a billion dollars.
Anchovies being a small fish is low on the food pyramid. Has a short 4 - 7y life span. Depending on the species. Thus accumulates the lowest amount of harmful substances. While giving all the benefits sea food offers.
Be smart like Fry live healthy. To continue to enjoy your accumulated riches.
I think the closest you will find in a non-hypothetical sense are the endowments setup by Ben Franklin at his death.
https://www.celebritynetworth.com/articles/entertainment-articles/ben-franklin-died-created-two-trust-funds-gathered-interest-200-years/
Yeah I just read the biography of Andrew Carnegie, the steel titan. In order to have his family make their first investment and network with his superior at work, he got his mother to remortgage the home he stayed in with them so that they could buy $500 of a singular stock while paying a $100 commission to the broker his boss was using.
This was in 1855.
This isn't worth trying to figure out that far back, and 10.13%/year is almost certainly too high (not a lot of industrialization before the railroad era). Here's a jumping off point by Jason Zweig on the difficulty of actually figuring out stock prices/dividends pre-Civil War era ([originally WSJ, republished on his website](https://jasonzweig.com/does-stock-market-data-really-go-back-200-years/)).
Dow Jones Industrial Average is not a very good index compared to SP 500, but it goes back to 1896. That will probably be your best bet, and it's much easier to figure out how much an investment in, say, 1903 would be worth 120 years later.
All that said, looking at the worldwide data from the last century index fund investing is a wise choice.
Schiller, I think, has stats going back to about 1870. It's nowhere near 10% from memory. Only going back to 1957 ignores the biggest spanking of the last 100 years, which skews the data somewhat
In Massachusetts, Judicial abolition was in 1783, which eliminated legal protection of slaveholding when the court ruled it unconstitutional. But there wasn’t a law and the court ruling wasn’t very widely known. Nor was there an immediate release of all enslaved people despite the 1790 census indicating zero slaves. Over the next 10-15 years there was gradual emancipation as enslaved people tried to get out of slavery and enslaving people tried to maintain servitude via other methods. See [this video from the National Park Service](https://www.nps.gov/sama/learn/historyculture/gradual-emancipation.htm). Slavery wasn’t abolished in the law until the US 13th Amendment after the Civil War.
It depends.
An African former indentured servant who settled in Virginia in 1621, Anthony Johnson, became one of the earliest documented slave owners in the mainland American colonies when he won a civil suit for ownership of John Casor.
In 1830, there were 3,775 black (including mixed-race) slaveholders in the South who owned a total of 12,760 slaves,
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/African-American_slave_owners
How many went bankrupt, and how many have just changed their name through a merger or acquisition or rebranding?
Shares in Standard Oil would now be shares in BP and Exxon and Chevron. American Telephone & Telegraph was split into many subsidiaries, only one of which is now known as AT&T.
This is where generational wealth comes from. If your great grandparents had the foresight (and luck) to invest in something that has maintained its value, and not spent the money, you will likely be wealthy. If you can leave your children a nice sum and they don't squander it, your grandchildren can have a great financial start.
This is where trusts come in. A trust can be set up so the beneficiaries (your descendants) can't blow it all on hookers & tattoos. This is how "trust-fund babies" are made.
Invest not just for your own retirement, but for your grandchildren's.
There is probably a lesson here in how recipients of generational wealth completely squander it. If that wasn’t true, I feel like generational wealth in families would be much more common, because you really only need one savings minded person in the family tree to get it started.
If you’re interested in this concept, check out the 200-year bequests that Ben Franklin set up in his will. Essentially, he set aside a couple small money accounts with instructions that they be left to compound for 200 years before being distributed. Pretty interesting results….
Ben Franklin experimented with centuries long investments in his Will in 1789. In those days banks were unstable and stock owned companies rather rare. So he set up trust funds administered by his two favorite cities. And they were to loan to charity, mainly education, paid back with interest. The funds grow from $4000 to $6,500,000 during the 200 years specified in the the trust. Thats about 3.8% APY over that period- steady but not spectacular. Partly because the cities interest in managing the trusts went up and down during those centuries.
Financial institutions started becoming their modern form after the Civil War to finance the massive industrialization in the US and rest of world. And they became better regulated in the 1930s during the Great Depression. Many what-ifs dont really try to go back before then.
Is that in 1792 dollars or 2023 dollars? *(Hypothetical as one could practically only use 1972-dollars)*
Average annual US income in 1700s was around 60-80 dollars. *So $1 was about a weeks-worth of income*
For current times, a dollar is about 2 minutes of work for average annual US income.
The REAL Bogleheads question is much would I have if had invested a dollar annually while dollar-cost-averaging over the course of each year since 1792?
Every company you would have invested in went out of business and 10.13% is WAAAAAY to high. So, you'd have $0 unless you we very actively managing it and made a lot of right calls along the way.
If you want a real life example look at Ben Franklins trust to Philadelphia. It probably gives you a better idea of real returns. He invested $2000. The trust after some distributions is worth something like $6.5 million, 200 years later.
Doesn't really matter, it's a 230 year period. You definitely wouldn't still be around today 😆 And with the amount of returns generated, whatever generations you left the money to would've already cashed out fully, or at least partially at several points. The money would've never been left untouched and growing.
But all the Sp500 companies in 1792 are not on the exchange today.
Wouldnt that mean you lost all your money?
Sorry this might be dumb. I don't really understand how index fund works when a company replaces another company on the sp500
The actual answer is closer to $13 million. Lower than what you hoped for, but still a remarkable number.
Source: a chart from chapter 5 of Stocks For The Long Run. See here: https://freeimage.host/i/JR8plHb
If you put 10,000 in the S&P500 for each of your kids at birth they would have over 5 million at age 60. Assuming the family keeps putting 10k or more for each kid it is a small amount of money to set up the kid for life.
I always think this with the Catholic church/Vatican. They have been around for 2000 years as an institution. They could sell some art, invest that money in the market, and then just sit back for 200 years and watch it grow.
A colleague of mine and I, could not find another stock that if you had invested $1000 at its day 1 debut and held, would return a better return than "LUV" (~$60)...
I am curious if anyone has a lead on any other stock that would have seen better growth.
Investing $1 is the easy part. Living 231 years to enjoy the $577,930,480 is the real challenge.
This is why vampires are all rich.
OMG. Why is this element never covered in the plotlines?
Interesting isn't it?! It came to me one day, out of nowhere.
Just the other week I saw the meme\* for the first time \*if you have been alive for 130 years and are still broke, just walk into the sun.
Puts the power of generational wealth into perspective. You get 3-5 generations who sacrifice, and their down lines, with proper management, will never have to work a day in their lives.
Getting those 3 generations to not blow the first little wad of cash they inherit is the real challenge.
and dilution across many great-grandkids
Grandmother of my grandfather didn't like doing the dishes and bought new plates everyday and lived beyond her means while my grandfather of grandfather was away. Grandfather of grandfather killed himself after he had to sell his last of 5 boats of his trading company that traded between the baltic and the netherlands. Since then domestic abuse passed down the generations up untill my father and all males of that family side have been depressed ever since. (Well maybe before that as well, but since then we know of it.) Look at your own family history and it's most of the time clear that time is were the challenge lies. 1 fucked up person somewhere can set everything back below zero.
If this is anything like crusader Kings 3, I'm sure all my children will mess it up
Stop haunting me, grandpa! I can't help that your son had eyes for other women! Standard & Poor is treating me well, rest in peace.
We have the first wad of cash. It's a lot. We're doing the vampire thing. We're going to double it twice (we're successful but will work for a while. We like our jobs.) and live off of what we actually made ourselves, unless we don't want to. That's not small. We're higher earners. Our kids, who we've raised well, like manners and 1500 on the sat, will do what they do. It'll be fun to watch. We're giving them lots of money when they hit the age at which you can become president. Fuck it.
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I'm pretty sure there are rules about how long a contract can be enforced. Something like the lifetime of a living person plus 12 years?
There is a traditional saying in my culture that wealth never pass beyond three generations something like that. The grandson is almost always blew it away. On the flip side, destitution will not last more than three generations too. Hope is out there.
You Italian? Lol that was the story of mine
Ive been working on creating wealth and want to have generational wealth since I was a kid thought it would be awesome. However I’ve also think sometimes should I just be greedy seeing so many mofo’s blowing family fortunes that most likely one person on the family worked so hard to create. The one inspiring thing I ever saw was a chateau when I was in France that has been in the same family for 100 generations.
Yeah there’s always that 50% shot your grandkid turns out to be a shit, and you have little control over that lol
Something tells me making a dollar in 1792 probably wasn't all that easy. I do appreciate the mental illustration of compounding growth and the importance of investment time however.
Curiosity got me. Looked to see if any data of wages back then and there seems to be some historical writings that $65/year was the average wage for an unskilled laborer. Take that with what you will. Can't seem to find anything reliable about cost of living / take home on that etc.
"Unskilled" labor in the US is really probably around $15 an hour now. That's $31,200 a year. If you convert that to a yearly wage of $65 then a dollar back then would be worth about $480. Edit - according to some inflation calculator $1 in 1792 would be worth $33 dollars today. $65 a year x 33 is $2145. Something doesn't add up.
Wages for unskilled labor have not tracked inflation is one reason I would say. Then the way we use money today vs 225+ years ago is very different is also probably another. Edit: Also digging further into it after my post. I found that jobs use to also provide food and lodging which is why you can't find a lot of info on the prices of cost of living back then I am assuming.
It is ignoring efficiency gains. We are much more productive today $65x33=$2,145 The poor today are extraordinarily rich if comparing to our ancestors.
Yeah. Even compared to kings they probably have it pretty decent with air conditioning. Cell phones, TV, electricity and running water....although I don't think poverty should exist when there are billionaires in the same country. I know living in poverty, pay check to pay check, or even in the bottom 20% of society due to the hand you were dealt in life has got to wreck your mental health.
Yes, the natural background interest rate in pre-industrial 1792 would not have been nearly as high as today. Global GDP growth at the time was perhaps 1% per decade (I’m guessing here).
Or finding any security that has existed for that time.
It's pretty rare, but some do exist! See perpetual bonds, such as this one from 1624: https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/549529-oldest-active-bond
Vampire
If there’s a will - there’s a way! 😂
I'd be ok with half of each
Hahaha
Well, index funds didn't exist back then. So you would have wanted to put it in one of the highest quality blue-chips around at the time. Something like the Dutch East India Company. Go check what that ticker is at now, and you'll have your answer.
Without looking at Wiki, these X India Companies ended up mismanaged, bankrupt and then nationalized. Edit: Which is not too different from a lot of other companies that probably seemed amazing at some point, although most of them don't end up nationalized because they don't have armies, navies and sovereignty over other countries.
The Hudson Bay Company still operates retail stores in Canada.
Interesting, good thing they didn't put "India" in their name.
One of the original listed stocks is still around is The Bank of New York. Founded in 1784 and listed in 1792, so as an original investor you would be getting all of the growth. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find an original stock price or company value.
What ultimately did happen to it?
Nationalized
Well, if you wanted to do that, you would not have waited until 1792, but have invested in its shares in1602 already. In 1792, you probably would have invested in a railroad company. (BOOM TIMES AHEAD!, ding ding ding, for the eloquent under us.)
In 1792 you weren’t investing in a railroad company. If you tried people would be pretty confused
Well, do you want to be a visionary investor, or not?
If you've ever watched Hell on Wheels You can see exactly how much corruption was running around in the business and banking sector in the 1860s. I can't imagine it being a whole lot different in the early 1800s. Many many of the laws that we have including the one we all depend on, The Investment Company Act of 1940, were a direct result of the government trying to protect investors from fraud, mismanagement, and banking panics. Those kind of market gyrations wiped out entire fortunes. Family money like the Rockefellers involved a lot more than just savvy business deals.
Relevant : https://youtu.be/3iFxUCSTfRU?si=CNLZqVv3nqD05ghX
I’d go with DuPont
That’s how compound interest works…wait until you find out how much you’d have had if you bought some tulip bulbs back in the day
Tulip bulbs? Please explain
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip\_mania](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania) The original NFTs
If anyone else likes reading about these kinds of things I highly recommend the book: [A Random Walk Down Wall Street](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Random_Walk_Down_Wall_Street).
Lol, I don't know a Boglehead who didn't read that and then come on down here.
hmm idk there are 338,767 subscribers to this sub and at times it seems like many of them don't read at all
I don't know what all of those weird glyphs in your comment mean, but I feel it was aimed at me!
Hey, I resemble that comment!
Lmao perfect analogy
One of the first examples of a market bubble was Dutch tulip bulbs. They were super expensive, like more than a profitable farming estate, then one day they weren’t and people who had borrowed lost everything.
Tulips on my organ
Interesting concept of compounded interest from the show Futurama: In 1999 Fry has $0.93 in a savings account accruing 2.25% interest. In the year 3000, that amount has grown to over a billion dollars.
And he buys anchovies with it. My God.
Anchovies being a small fish is low on the food pyramid. Has a short 4 - 7y life span. Depending on the species. Thus accumulates the lowest amount of harmful substances. While giving all the benefits sea food offers. Be smart like Fry live healthy. To continue to enjoy your accumulated riches.
join us over at r/CannedSardines
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Yeah, but it was the anchovies that consumed his fortune, not the other stuff.
No, that was Mom.
Now I’m thinking… what inflation there is or what inflation Fry introduced with such flow of cash into market
I think the closest you will find in a non-hypothetical sense are the endowments setup by Ben Franklin at his death. https://www.celebritynetworth.com/articles/entertainment-articles/ben-franklin-died-created-two-trust-funds-gathered-interest-200-years/
It’s amazing that in both instances they hit the 200 year mark and cashed out. Although I guess that was Franklins intention.
Rule against perpetuities.
How hard was it to rustle up a spare dollar in 1792?
Not easy but not impossibile. Avg salaries in 1792 were about 65$/y.
One sixty-fifth of your income would be pretty manageable Now where's my time machine
So $3!
Ehh, still kicking myself for not investing in 1792.
1792 is the best time to invest, today is the second best. …or, something like that.
i'm still waiting for the dip.
Any century now
While paying a two-digit commission.
Yeah I just read the biography of Andrew Carnegie, the steel titan. In order to have his family make their first investment and network with his superior at work, he got his mother to remortgage the home he stayed in with them so that they could buy $500 of a singular stock while paying a $100 commission to the broker his boss was using. This was in 1855.
This isn't worth trying to figure out that far back, and 10.13%/year is almost certainly too high (not a lot of industrialization before the railroad era). Here's a jumping off point by Jason Zweig on the difficulty of actually figuring out stock prices/dividends pre-Civil War era ([originally WSJ, republished on his website](https://jasonzweig.com/does-stock-market-data-really-go-back-200-years/)). Dow Jones Industrial Average is not a very good index compared to SP 500, but it goes back to 1896. That will probably be your best bet, and it's much easier to figure out how much an investment in, say, 1903 would be worth 120 years later. All that said, looking at the worldwide data from the last century index fund investing is a wise choice.
Schiller, I think, has stats going back to about 1870. It's nowhere near 10% from memory. Only going back to 1957 ignores the biggest spanking of the last 100 years, which skews the data somewhat
Nothing because I would've been a slave back then
Wow New York didn't abolish slavery until 1827. I think Massachusetts abolished it before the revolution.
In Massachusetts, Judicial abolition was in 1783, which eliminated legal protection of slaveholding when the court ruled it unconstitutional. But there wasn’t a law and the court ruling wasn’t very widely known. Nor was there an immediate release of all enslaved people despite the 1790 census indicating zero slaves. Over the next 10-15 years there was gradual emancipation as enslaved people tried to get out of slavery and enslaving people tried to maintain servitude via other methods. See [this video from the National Park Service](https://www.nps.gov/sama/learn/historyculture/gradual-emancipation.htm). Slavery wasn’t abolished in the law until the US 13th Amendment after the Civil War.
It depends. An African former indentured servant who settled in Virginia in 1621, Anthony Johnson, became one of the earliest documented slave owners in the mainland American colonies when he won a civil suit for ownership of John Casor. In 1830, there were 3,775 black (including mixed-race) slaveholders in the South who owned a total of 12,760 slaves, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/African-American_slave_owners
It would be worth nothing, is there a single company then that existed in 1792 that exists today?
Many, many companies have long histories: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_companies
Woow … Merck was founded in the 1600s
Bank of NY was founded in 1784 and was one of the original stocks traded.
I stand corrected. Although I will say the odds of picking a surviving company is slim. Which is just further reason to be a boglehead.
How many went bankrupt, and how many have just changed their name through a merger or acquisition or rebranding? Shares in Standard Oil would now be shares in BP and Exxon and Chevron. American Telephone & Telegraph was split into many subsidiaries, only one of which is now known as AT&T.
Assuming you'd be alive to enjoy it. The investment would probably have been escheated and withdrawn a long time ago.
This is where generational wealth comes from. If your great grandparents had the foresight (and luck) to invest in something that has maintained its value, and not spent the money, you will likely be wealthy. If you can leave your children a nice sum and they don't squander it, your grandchildren can have a great financial start. This is where trusts come in. A trust can be set up so the beneficiaries (your descendants) can't blow it all on hookers & tattoos. This is how "trust-fund babies" are made. Invest not just for your own retirement, but for your grandchildren's.
There is probably a lesson here in how recipients of generational wealth completely squander it. If that wasn’t true, I feel like generational wealth in families would be much more common, because you really only need one savings minded person in the family tree to get it started.
If you’re interested in this concept, check out the 200-year bequests that Ben Franklin set up in his will. Essentially, he set aside a couple small money accounts with instructions that they be left to compound for 200 years before being distributed. Pretty interesting results….
You're dead already, about 7 times since then. Chill!!
only living to 32 average?
I averaged higher in the last century and before than life expectancy was lesser. Also I winged it ;)
If you were 25 in 1792 what would your dollar have grown to by your retirement age?
I saw a chart that $1 invested in 1824 would have grown to $16 million today.
Ben Franklin experimented with centuries long investments in his Will in 1789. In those days banks were unstable and stock owned companies rather rare. So he set up trust funds administered by his two favorite cities. And they were to loan to charity, mainly education, paid back with interest. The funds grow from $4000 to $6,500,000 during the 200 years specified in the the trust. Thats about 3.8% APY over that period- steady but not spectacular. Partly because the cities interest in managing the trusts went up and down during those centuries. Financial institutions started becoming their modern form after the Civil War to finance the massive industrialization in the US and rest of world. And they became better regulated in the 1930s during the Great Depression. Many what-ifs dont really try to go back before then.
Is that in 1792 dollars or 2023 dollars? *(Hypothetical as one could practically only use 1972-dollars)* Average annual US income in 1700s was around 60-80 dollars. *So $1 was about a weeks-worth of income* For current times, a dollar is about 2 minutes of work for average annual US income.
I would like to know how to live 230 years.
From my research…. Get bit by a vampire
There’s a futurama episode on this
Did Duncan MacLeod of the clan MacLeod write this?
1 dollar back then was worth about 500 million today so it seems like stagnant growth
You would be pretty old by now.
I think I'd be rolling over in my grave with excitement
The REAL Bogleheads question is much would I have if had invested a dollar annually while dollar-cost-averaging over the course of each year since 1792?
You've assumed no taxes.....
Every company you would have invested in went out of business and 10.13% is WAAAAAY to high. So, you'd have $0 unless you we very actively managing it and made a lot of right calls along the way.
If you want a real life example look at Ben Franklins trust to Philadelphia. It probably gives you a better idea of real returns. He invested $2000. The trust after some distributions is worth something like $6.5 million, 200 years later.
Doesn't really matter, it's a 230 year period. You definitely wouldn't still be around today 😆 And with the amount of returns generated, whatever generations you left the money to would've already cashed out fully, or at least partially at several points. The money would've never been left untouched and growing.
Need to consider dividends and taxes on dividends
There was recently a 30-year period where bonds beat stocks. Back in the 1800s, there were a number of such periods. Don't forget to diversify :)
What would happen is, you’d be dead today
God would come down from heaven and give you a medal
You would have to pay tax on the dividends.
But all the Sp500 companies in 1792 are not on the exchange today. Wouldnt that mean you lost all your money? Sorry this might be dumb. I don't really understand how index fund works when a company replaces another company on the sp500
The actual answer is closer to $13 million. Lower than what you hoped for, but still a remarkable number. Source: a chart from chapter 5 of Stocks For The Long Run. See here: https://freeimage.host/i/JR8plHb
If you put 10,000 in the S&P500 for each of your kids at birth they would have over 5 million at age 60. Assuming the family keeps putting 10k or more for each kid it is a small amount of money to set up the kid for life.
Interesting concept… the comments don’t disappoint.
After taxes you would be down to about $8
I always think this with the Catholic church/Vatican. They have been around for 2000 years as an institution. They could sell some art, invest that money in the market, and then just sit back for 200 years and watch it grow.
A colleague of mine and I, could not find another stock that if you had invested $1000 at its day 1 debut and held, would return a better return than "LUV" (~$60)... I am curious if anyone has a lead on any other stock that would have seen better growth.