Everyone’s wondering: Where did Frank Mariels get his money?
When I read that Frank Mariels had left $4.4 million to the Virginia Museum of Natural History, and I had never even heard of Frank Mariels, I had to get to the bottom of it.
It took a little digging, and then I made a few breakthroughs which led me to a lot of digging, and I found out a few things.
Frank Mariels lived in a modest house in a working-class neighborhood. His career was as the lead traffic-light technician for the City of Martinsville, and later, as an electrician. He won prizes for things he’d built and made in high school, and his hobbies as an adult were things such as building model airplanes. He didn’t seem to have been married, nor did he have children.
He just wasn’t one of those people you heard anything about.
Yet he was a multi-millionaire.
Many people flash their cash and brag with their bling, but Frank Mariel’s case reminds us you can’t tell a book by its cover.
The best lessons I got in finance came from immigrants. Of course, my parents and my grandparents taught me about investing and not wasting money, but I didn’t see my grandparents enough for it to sink in, and like a lot of kids I didn’t pay attention to my parents’ advice and admonishments until well after I was on my own.
But the immigrants – I engaged with them every day at work, and their lessons really sunk in.
I was a real estate agent for many years in a small town in North Carolina. Generally speaking, American-born house-buyers usually asked me about and paid most attention to what the lowest house payment could be.
Homebuyers who were from other countries, instead, would ask me – with a look of suspicion – “Cuanto sube con interes?” (How much does it go up with interest?) when I told them the price of a house.
In working so often with immigrant homebuyers who focused on the impact of interest I, also, internalized seeing things at total cost, financing included.
This was before everyone was using smart phones, so I had photocopied pages from the amortization tables book to hand out to teach people the differences in monthly payment versus the overall final expense with interest, and how much you could save by paying a loan off faster.
Real estate agents only get paid if they sell property, because they work on commission, not regular paychecks.
For people who came to our office without a letter of loan pre-qualification from a bank, we’d help them calculate how much house they’d qualify for. In case after case, it would turn out that high car payments ruined people’s chances of having money left over in their budget for a house payment.
Since we regularly saw into people’s financial situations and came to notice patterns, real estate agents in my town would jump out of their seats and run all over each other to be the first to greet anyone who pulled up in a junky car, wearing clean but old clothing, and of course, no designer handbags nor professional manicures on the women.
In contrast, real estate agents were leery of someone who pulled up in a new vehicle or a fancy vehicle. We’d say to each other, before the people got through our door: “They’re driving their house payment.”
Decades after my career in real estate, and still privy to information, I see that very often that those families in the smaller, plainer houses are now in better financial shape, whereas families in large or in fact, ostentatious houses, often tinker on the edge of financial disaster.
And this brings us back to Frank Mariels, whose lifestyle did not brag on his wealth.
From a lot of investigating I’ve done on Mr. Mariels, I learned that he probably learned how to invest from a neighbor, whom I am not going to name out of respect for the family’s privacy. This other Oak Grove Avenue resident, a retired factory worker, left several million dollars to his heirs after he passed away.
The late Mr. Mariels and his neighbor are reminders that you sure can’t tell a book by its cover.
