I am a very avid reader and have been for many years. I currently read approximately one book every five days or so, amounting to somewhere between fifty and one hundred books per year.
Ever since I completed graduate school in 1998, just a few months before our son was born, I have read for fun. Mostly novels, mostly fiction, and everything by about twenty to twenty-five popular authors like Stephen King, Anne Rice, John Grisham, Jonathan Kellerman, Dan Brown, Brad Meltzer, Steve Berry, Mario Puzo, Peter Straub, David Baldacci, David Liss, Scott Turow, Michael Connelly, Andrew Gross, Daniel Silva, John LeCarre, Len Deighton and others of their ilk.
I also read many books written by little-know authors too numerous to recall.
Five years ago, I read a book that I thoroughly enjoyed called Capital: A Novel
. Not to be confused with the widely popular book on economics by Thomas Piketty that took the world by storm in 2013.
This novel by John Lanchester was set in the South London neighborhood of Clapham and came out in 2012.
I read the dust jacket, and the description of the story of a high-end street in London and the struggles of its residents captured my interest enough to check the 527 page book out from our local library. I read it over the period of about a week.
This post is not meant to describe or review this book, although I would certainly recommend it. The story of how Pepys Road transformed over many decades from a blue collar, working class street that was considered outside of the central business district in London to an up-and-coming gentrified street home to lawyers, bankers and other high rollers is fascinating.
Lanchester's novel details the trials and travails of six families who reside on Pepys Road, five of whom are property owners (one a professional athlete and his father who do not actually own the property), and their varying degrees of attaining not the American Dream in this case but the British Dream.
In the story, only one original resident remains, a woman in her eighties named Petunia Howe whose grandfather had bought Number 42 “off the plan” before it was even built back in the late 1800s. Petunia’s grandfather, father and husband were all barrister’s clerks in Lincoln’s Inn, the job passed on one to the other when nepotism still ruled at all levels. Her husband died five years ago and Petunia herself is approaching the end of her days — still, both her memories and current experience on Pepys Road are important to the continuity of the various story lines.
Petunia's crumbling terraced house had not had any linoleum, wallpaper or electrical wiring updated over the past fifty years, until her granddaughter decides to have the property remodeled to bring it up to the standards of the surrounding homes, which have been updated and remodeled over the recent years to the tunes of hundreds of thousands of pounds as property values continued ascending skyward.
Far from being purely altruistic, her granddaughter's ulterior motive is to maximize the sales price potential for 42 Pepys Road in anticipation of her grandmother's imminent demise as her health rapidly fails. Petunia is utterly unaware of the immense property value of her family home, and does not seek the medical attention that she requires due to not having enough money.
After tearing out a wall in an upstairs attic area while preparing for expansion of the upstairs, struggling Polish contractor Zbigniew, who had been wooing (there's an old-fashioned word for you) a beautiful Hungarian nanny named Matya who works for a neighboring family on Pepys Road, comes across a secret stash of long-forgotten hidden cash. Half a million pounds to be exact.
Toiling for his daily bread and striving to lift himself above his basic hand-to-mouth existence, while also trying to prove himself worthy of Matya, this is more money than he can comprehend. It would solve all financial matters for this guy for good, prove his worthiness and ability to make a living, and thus Zbigniew anguishes over what to do with it.
Maybe not as much as I anguished over it for a few days after reading that portion of Capital and before Zbigniew made his decision.
The thoughts that I had over finding an untraceable amount of cash in this huge amount were on my mind throughout a few work days, and I would ponder it at night, too.
There was no question what my late father or both of my late grandfathers would have done in that situation. None of the three would hesitate for an instant to turn it in, even if they were down to their bottom ten. With my wife and children, the same thing. My mother would do the same thing now, without even giving it a second thought.
I admire the unquestionable honesty of those closest to me, but I can honestly say that I would not instantly turn the cash over to someone or report it to the elderly homeowner or her granddaughter. I especially would avoid mentioning it to her granddaughter.
I can recall thinking about it hard for a few days in a row while walking on the one-and-a-half mile loop that I walk most days during my lunch hour.
Half a million bucks, let alone pounds, is a hell of a lot of cash. This is an American Money Mensch blog, so let's talk dollars.
I did some crude and quick math, figuring that it would take five hundred months, or over forty-one years, if I "just" spent an extra grand in cash per month. That's no good.
I could not exactly come in with $130,000 in cash to my bank to pay off the mortgage on our home without drawing undue attention as to where the cash came from, so that was out.
One of the challenges of having that much cash would be not spending too much of it at one place or using too much of it at one time. As everybody knows, the IRS tracks cash transactions of $10,000 or more and I was a regular middle class Money Mensch then just like I am now, not a south beach drug dealer who buys mansions and Ferraris with cash.
No, the best math that I could come up with was spending more like an average of $2,000 in cash per month for two hundred and fifty months, or the next twenty years or so. It would sure lighten the financial burden that I carry with me every day, and if I suddenly lost my job for whatever reason, we would be able to survive on whatever is left until I could get back on my feet. Meanwhile, it would allow me to legitimately invest more in the T. Rowe Price and Vanguard funds that I favor with the extra funds that I would no longer have to spend on every day items.
No, I was not going to hand over that half million bucks.
I though about the day-to-day, week-to-week and month-to-month things that I could start paying for in cash like haircuts, stuff at the hardware store, gasoline for our cars, groceries that I buy, carry-out dinners that I bring home, lunches out, coffee and I might even purchase an occasional Starbucks if I had an extra two grand in cash to burn through every month. After all, that is an extra five hundred per week, which is a lot of money to a middle class guy like me.
Of course, I would buy a lot of books, too.
I thought about using the cash for more substantial items, perhaps paying utility bills and credit card bills in cash. Perhaps buying prepaid cards in increments of $500 from local convenience stores.
Perhaps paying things like property tax bills with money orders that I would pay local currency exchanges for. They don't ask where you got the cash from.
When I read this five years ago, my family was still going to Disney World on a fairly regular basis.
As any of you who have stayed there know well, you could easily burn through a thousand or more bucks in a week there if you dine at the better restaurants, rent things like boats or bicycles or purchase tickets to things like Cirque du Soleil or pay an extra hundred for a fireworks dessert party or character-themed dinner.
I became a little greedier, thinking that I might want to spend more than two grand per month in cash.
The main thing is I would not want to be too obvious about it, spending loads of cash conspicuously.
The last thing that someone spending that amount of cash wants is an IRS auditor or a forensic accountant digging through your records trying to determine how you spent ten grand in a few months without ever making a withdrawal from your bank account.
Half a million dollars may be more than I will be able to accumulate in my lifetime. If I came about it "clean," like making a killing off of stocks, inheriting a vast amount or selling hundreds of thousands of eBooks, that would be far more preferable.
If I had a half million dollars of "clean" money, I would undoubtedly pay off the $130,000 that we owe on our modest middle class house, and then embark on another $25,000 to $50,000 worth of improvements to make our house better for us and for resale value. I would probably want to sell our house and upgrade to a better one fairly soon.
We would replace our junker vehicles with new ones, and purchase a third for our son, and most likely a fourth one for our daughter in a few years when she starts driving.
We would replace our worn out furniture and get better phones, a "smart" TV and other accoutrements of upper middle class life. We would go on some vacations. Neither my wife nor I have ever been out of the country. Our daughter has only seen the ocean one one day this past December while traveling on a marching band trip to Florida. Our son has a lengthy punch list of many places that he would like to go.
I would not stop investing; quite the opposite. I would invest the $5,500 per year in my wife's and my IRA that we are currently allowed to, then would increase that to $6,500 per year when we turn fifty years of age. I would invest more in some of the mutual funds that I like best, as well, including T. Rowe Price's Blue Chip Growth fund, its Capital Appreciation fund, Vanguard's Wellington fund and Vanguard's Primecap fund too. Both fund families have several other funds that I would like to buy into, but there is only so much to go around and in real life I do not have it.
The extra money to invest would actually come out of our regular checking account since I would not be using all of that money to pay for the every day items that I would be paying for with cash instead of my debit card if I discovered a stash with half a million in it.
Yes, after mulling over it for several days, I came to a conclusion about what I would do with the money and it is something that I am not proud of but at least honest about.
I was going to report what Zbigniew did, but decided against it. After all, why spoil it for you if you decide to read the book?
The more pertinent question that I have is, what would you do if you came across half a million dollars in completely untraceable cash? Would you do like my parents, grandparents, wife and children would do? Would you anguish over it? Or would you count your lucky stars like I would and plan for years of better-managed cash flow for you and yours?
Ever since I completed graduate school in 1998, just a few months before our son was born, I have read for fun. Mostly novels, mostly fiction, and everything by about twenty to twenty-five popular authors like Stephen King, Anne Rice, John Grisham, Jonathan Kellerman, Dan Brown, Brad Meltzer, Steve Berry, Mario Puzo, Peter Straub, David Baldacci, David Liss, Scott Turow, Michael Connelly, Andrew Gross, Daniel Silva, John LeCarre, Len Deighton and others of their ilk.
I also read many books written by little-know authors too numerous to recall.
Five years ago, I read a book that I thoroughly enjoyed called Capital: A Novel
. Not to be confused with the widely popular book on economics by Thomas Piketty that took the world by storm in 2013.This novel by John Lanchester was set in the South London neighborhood of Clapham and came out in 2012.
 |
This post is not meant to describe or review this book, although I would certainly recommend it. The story of how Pepys Road transformed over many decades from a blue collar, working class street that was considered outside of the central business district in London to an up-and-coming gentrified street home to lawyers, bankers and other high rollers is fascinating.
Lanchester's novel details the trials and travails of six families who reside on Pepys Road, five of whom are property owners (one a professional athlete and his father who do not actually own the property), and their varying degrees of attaining not the American Dream in this case but the British Dream.
In the story, only one original resident remains, a woman in her eighties named Petunia Howe whose grandfather had bought Number 42 “off the plan” before it was even built back in the late 1800s. Petunia’s grandfather, father and husband were all barrister’s clerks in Lincoln’s Inn, the job passed on one to the other when nepotism still ruled at all levels. Her husband died five years ago and Petunia herself is approaching the end of her days — still, both her memories and current experience on Pepys Road are important to the continuity of the various story lines.
Petunia's crumbling terraced house had not had any linoleum, wallpaper or electrical wiring updated over the past fifty years, until her granddaughter decides to have the property remodeled to bring it up to the standards of the surrounding homes, which have been updated and remodeled over the recent years to the tunes of hundreds of thousands of pounds as property values continued ascending skyward.
Far from being purely altruistic, her granddaughter's ulterior motive is to maximize the sales price potential for 42 Pepys Road in anticipation of her grandmother's imminent demise as her health rapidly fails. Petunia is utterly unaware of the immense property value of her family home, and does not seek the medical attention that she requires due to not having enough money.
After tearing out a wall in an upstairs attic area while preparing for expansion of the upstairs, struggling Polish contractor Zbigniew, who had been wooing (there's an old-fashioned word for you) a beautiful Hungarian nanny named Matya who works for a neighboring family on Pepys Road, comes across a secret stash of long-forgotten hidden cash. Half a million pounds to be exact.
Toiling for his daily bread and striving to lift himself above his basic hand-to-mouth existence, while also trying to prove himself worthy of Matya, this is more money than he can comprehend. It would solve all financial matters for this guy for good, prove his worthiness and ability to make a living, and thus Zbigniew anguishes over what to do with it.
Maybe not as much as I anguished over it for a few days after reading that portion of Capital and before Zbigniew made his decision.
The thoughts that I had over finding an untraceable amount of cash in this huge amount were on my mind throughout a few work days, and I would ponder it at night, too.
There was no question what my late father or both of my late grandfathers would have done in that situation. None of the three would hesitate for an instant to turn it in, even if they were down to their bottom ten. With my wife and children, the same thing. My mother would do the same thing now, without even giving it a second thought.
I admire the unquestionable honesty of those closest to me, but I can honestly say that I would not instantly turn the cash over to someone or report it to the elderly homeowner or her granddaughter. I especially would avoid mentioning it to her granddaughter.
I can recall thinking about it hard for a few days in a row while walking on the one-and-a-half mile loop that I walk most days during my lunch hour.
Half a million bucks, let alone pounds, is a hell of a lot of cash. This is an American Money Mensch blog, so let's talk dollars.
I did some crude and quick math, figuring that it would take five hundred months, or over forty-one years, if I "just" spent an extra grand in cash per month. That's no good.
I could not exactly come in with $130,000 in cash to my bank to pay off the mortgage on our home without drawing undue attention as to where the cash came from, so that was out.
One of the challenges of having that much cash would be not spending too much of it at one place or using too much of it at one time. As everybody knows, the IRS tracks cash transactions of $10,000 or more and I was a regular middle class Money Mensch then just like I am now, not a south beach drug dealer who buys mansions and Ferraris with cash.
No, the best math that I could come up with was spending more like an average of $2,000 in cash per month for two hundred and fifty months, or the next twenty years or so. It would sure lighten the financial burden that I carry with me every day, and if I suddenly lost my job for whatever reason, we would be able to survive on whatever is left until I could get back on my feet. Meanwhile, it would allow me to legitimately invest more in the T. Rowe Price and Vanguard funds that I favor with the extra funds that I would no longer have to spend on every day items.
No, I was not going to hand over that half million bucks.
I though about the day-to-day, week-to-week and month-to-month things that I could start paying for in cash like haircuts, stuff at the hardware store, gasoline for our cars, groceries that I buy, carry-out dinners that I bring home, lunches out, coffee and I might even purchase an occasional Starbucks if I had an extra two grand in cash to burn through every month. After all, that is an extra five hundred per week, which is a lot of money to a middle class guy like me.
Of course, I would buy a lot of books, too.
I thought about using the cash for more substantial items, perhaps paying utility bills and credit card bills in cash. Perhaps buying prepaid cards in increments of $500 from local convenience stores.
Perhaps paying things like property tax bills with money orders that I would pay local currency exchanges for. They don't ask where you got the cash from.
 |
| I would purchase $500 prepaid Visa cards if I had half a million in cash. |
As any of you who have stayed there know well, you could easily burn through a thousand or more bucks in a week there if you dine at the better restaurants, rent things like boats or bicycles or purchase tickets to things like Cirque du Soleil or pay an extra hundred for a fireworks dessert party or character-themed dinner.
 |
| One could easily burn through $500 or more in cash per day at Disney World. |
I became a little greedier, thinking that I might want to spend more than two grand per month in cash.
The main thing is I would not want to be too obvious about it, spending loads of cash conspicuously.
The last thing that someone spending that amount of cash wants is an IRS auditor or a forensic accountant digging through your records trying to determine how you spent ten grand in a few months without ever making a withdrawal from your bank account.
Half a million dollars may be more than I will be able to accumulate in my lifetime. If I came about it "clean," like making a killing off of stocks, inheriting a vast amount or selling hundreds of thousands of eBooks, that would be far more preferable.
If I had a half million dollars of "clean" money, I would undoubtedly pay off the $130,000 that we owe on our modest middle class house, and then embark on another $25,000 to $50,000 worth of improvements to make our house better for us and for resale value. I would probably want to sell our house and upgrade to a better one fairly soon.
We would replace our junker vehicles with new ones, and purchase a third for our son, and most likely a fourth one for our daughter in a few years when she starts driving.
We would replace our worn out furniture and get better phones, a "smart" TV and other accoutrements of upper middle class life. We would go on some vacations. Neither my wife nor I have ever been out of the country. Our daughter has only seen the ocean one one day this past December while traveling on a marching band trip to Florida. Our son has a lengthy punch list of many places that he would like to go.
I would not stop investing; quite the opposite. I would invest the $5,500 per year in my wife's and my IRA that we are currently allowed to, then would increase that to $6,500 per year when we turn fifty years of age. I would invest more in some of the mutual funds that I like best, as well, including T. Rowe Price's Blue Chip Growth fund, its Capital Appreciation fund, Vanguard's Wellington fund and Vanguard's Primecap fund too. Both fund families have several other funds that I would like to buy into, but there is only so much to go around and in real life I do not have it.
The extra money to invest would actually come out of our regular checking account since I would not be using all of that money to pay for the every day items that I would be paying for with cash instead of my debit card if I discovered a stash with half a million in it.
Yes, after mulling over it for several days, I came to a conclusion about what I would do with the money and it is something that I am not proud of but at least honest about.
I was going to report what Zbigniew did, but decided against it. After all, why spoil it for you if you decide to read the book?
The more pertinent question that I have is, what would you do if you came across half a million dollars in completely untraceable cash? Would you do like my parents, grandparents, wife and children would do? Would you anguish over it? Or would you count your lucky stars like I would and plan for years of better-managed cash flow for you and yours?
 |
| What would you do if you came across half a million dollars in completely untraceable cash? |
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