Warren Buffett has stopped gifting his family $10,000 every Christmas after he uncovered what they were spending the cash on.
Buffett is known as being one of the world’s most successful investors and would make it an annual tradition to gift his family with $10,000 each in hundred dollar bills.
However, according to Mary Buffett, who is Buffett’s former daughter-in-law having been married to his son Peter, recipients would soon start spending the cash, often blowing it all after Christmas Day.
So, the successful investor decided to change his tack and stopped giving his family members money at Christmas.
Advert
However, he didn’t leave them empty handed as instead he began to buy shares for them.
Speaking to ThinkAdvisor back in 2019, Mary said: “One Christmas there was an envelope with a letter from him. Instead of cash, he’d given us $10,000 worth of shares in a company he’d recently bought, a trust Coca-Cola had. He said to either cash them in or keep them.”
She continued: “I thought ‘Well, [this stock] is worth more than $10,000.’ So I kept it, and it kept going up.”
Buffett is known for his strategic investments and has shed light in the past on how he made his billions.
In a meeting in 2020, Buffett said: “You shouldn’t buy stocks unless you expect...to hold them for a very extended period and you are prepared financially and psychologically to hold them the same way you would hold a farm, and never look at a quote. You don’t need to pay attention to them.”
So, what do you get the man who is worth an estimated $150 billion? Well, Mary made the decision that the best gift she could give Buffett is to show how successful she had become.
She went on to say: “The first year we were married, I realized, ‘Warren is very rich. Therefore, he doesn’t want anything’.
“I just wanted to show him, ‘Look, we’re doing good’.”
And it looks like Buffett isn’t the only one who gives out cash at Christmas time - although many might not be gifting quite as much as him.
According to insurance giant SunLife, over one in five people over the age of 50 have given a large amount of money as a present in the last five years.
The biggest forms of cash gifted by older family members were given towards things like house deposits.