A Fine Example
MY MOTHER is 95 years old and in fairly good shape for her age. Yes, she repeats herself quite often. When she does, I tend to let it go in one ear and out the other.
When she talks about my father, however, I listen very closely. One day, as I was backing the car out of the garage, she looked at all the cabinets my father built and said for the umpteenth time, ���Sam was a smart man. Look at all the things he designed and built.���
My father was one of the wisest men I���ve ever known. He was a machinist by trade. But he was very knowledgeable about life in general, including personal finance. I still remember something he said to me when I was young:��“It’s not how much money you make that���s important. It’s what you do with your money that���s important.”
One day, I asked my father when would be a good time to invest some extra money I received from my employer. He answered ���yesterday������a reminder of the importance of investing early.
He never tried to time the stock market or game the system in other ways. He was a meat-and-potatoes kind of investor. Just invest your money in a low-cost diversified fund and watch it grow. Today, my mother is still living off the money that her and my father invested. Isn���t that proof that you don���t have to reinvent the wheel when it comes to investing?
Not only did I learn the basic principles about investing from my father, but also he instilled in me a work ethic that propelled me through my life.��When I was a teenager, I used to watch him get up early to go to work and come home late in the evening. He sometimes did this six days a week. He and my mother also managed a 36-unit apartment building that required a lot of his time.
I used to say to myself, ���How does this man work so hard?��� Then, one summer during high school, I found myself working 50-plus hours a week at my father���s employer. Before I knew it, I was working six days a week, just like him.
That hard work continued throughout my career. It opened doors for me and earned me numerous promotions. One day, I was sitting in the office of my future boss. He was looking at my resume. He said, ���I see you have an MBA. What really impresses me is not so much that you have an MBA, but you earned it while working fulltime. That tells me a lot about your character. That took a lot of commitment and hard work.���
The comment says less about me and more about the type of person my father was: He was a hard-working, blue-collar worker who wasn���t afraid to get his hands dirty���and that was the example I strove to emulate. With the money he earned, he was able to build an investment portfolio that would provide a comfortable retirement for him and his wife. His financial success was built on three simple principles: Work hard, save and invest in low-cost, diversified funds.
Dennis Friedman retired from Boeing Satellite Systems after a 30-year career in manufacturing. Born in Ohio, Dennis is a California transplant with a bachelor’s degree in history and an MBA. A self-described “humble investor,” he likes reading historical novels and about personal finance. His previous articles include Building Wealth,��Not My Priority��and��Power of Two.
��Follow Dennis on Twitter��@DMFrie.
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