Quote:
Originally Posted by NickMPK
I realize that an accountant can make a very good living, but how does an accountant become -that- wealthy, especially one with apparently no public profile? And even owning a few properties doesn't give you immediate access to hundreds of thousands of dollars to gamble away on a regular basis.
If you are not putting kids through college, it becomes a WHOLE lot easier to have discretionary income with any manner of decent paying job and working one's adult life. He also was reported to have had history working for DoD from one article I saw, so the question would be whether he was a standard salary desk jockey (again, with decent retirement benefits) or whether he was a numbers cruncher on consultant pay. And, depending on length of service, there may have been decent pension money even from the postal work. In his mid-60's, it is not at all inconceivable that the guy was worth several million...
Even a modest investment portfolio across the length of time that guy was working and living could have yielded large returns. And while his was not likely an ESOP sort of thing, there are lots of people that age who have decent amounts of stock purchased quite cheap compared to current market valuations. Good example is some of the certificates we were finding in Dad's stuff when he passed...tons of XOM that was acquired at a split-adjusted price of two dollars or so. I remember being quite aghast at the financials when we dealt with the estate simply because he and mom didn't give the appearances of people like the type that had THAT kind of money.
One cannot also discount the possibility of decent amounts of money having been squirreled away by their father from the robbery activities.