The social worker who spent his life around children with nothing
He patched his shoes with duct tape and bought lunch from the supermarket clearance shelf. He left eleven million dollars.
Alan Naiman worked for Washington State's child protective services. His job was placing children who had been removed from their homes, and colleagues described someone who would spend his own money on car seats, clothing and other things the state would not fund.
He also drove cars until they stopped, mended his shoes with tape, and bought food from the reduced shelf. When he died of cancer in January 2018, aged 63, his estate was worth close to $11 million. Almost all of it went to charities working with children in poverty, foster care, and with disabilities.
Where the money came from
- A career of saving aggressively from a public-sector salary, sustained over decades.
- Second and third jobs worked for years, including night shifts, alongside the main one.
- Investments and property, held and not spent.
- An inheritance from his parents, which he added to rather than used.
He had an older brother with a developmental disability whom he cared for, and who died in 2013. Several accounts suggest much of the saving was to ensure his brother would be provided for whatever happened. The money was accumulated against a responsibility rather than for its own sake — which is a different story from the one usually told about extreme savers, and it is the one the people who knew him tell.
Why it belongs at the end of this group
Ronald Read, Grace Groner, Oseola McCarty, Russ Gremel, Sylvia Bloom and Anne Scheiber all produced the same outcome by the same behaviour: decades of not spending, and nothing withdrawn. What separates them is why, and the answers range from a grievance to a brother.
In every case the fortune existed because it was never used, and in every case it was given away after death. That is the common thread of this entire theme, and it is worth sitting with rather than converting into a technique. The money was real and the life it was extracted from was also real.
The mechanism
Thinking in decades is explained in Thinking in decades, in the Learn curriculum.
Where to check this
More from the quiet compounders
All Reckonings- Curt Degerman — The man who read the Financial Times in the bins
- Russ Gremel — He bought a thousand dollars of Walgreens and bought a nature reserve
- Ronald Read — The janitor with an $8 million portfolio