A Vermont janitor Ronald Read quietly invested for decades; when he died at 92, his estate was worth nearly $8 million

Ronald Read didn't look like a wealthy man. For years, the Vermont resident worked ordinary jobs. He spent about 25 years at a gas station and later worked as a janitor at J.C. Penney for 17 years. Nothing about those jobs suggested that he was quietly building a fortune.

When Read died in 2014 at the age of 92, the value of his estate was close to $8 million. The number caught people off guard because Read had never lived like someone with that kind of money.

Ronald Read: The Janitor Who Quietly Built an $8 Million Fortune

Read wasn't a Wall Street professional. He was a small investor who spent years reading about companies and managing his own money. People who knew him described him as careful with his spending. He drove an older Toyota Yaris, wore inexpensive clothes and lived a fairly modest life. His lifestyle gave little indication of what was sitting in his investment accounts.

His stock holdings included large American companies such as AT&T, Bank of America, CVS, Deere, General Electric and General Motors. He also owned shares of companies including Procter & Gamble and Johnson & Johnson.

Dividends were an important part of the strategy. Many of the companies he owned regularly paid shareholders a portion of their profits. Reinvesting those payments can gradually increase the number of shares an investor owns, giving future dividends more shares to work with.

Read had something else that most investors can't buy: time. He kept many investments for years. That meant the growth of the companies, dividends and long-term market gains could build on one another instead of being interrupted by constant buying and selling.

There was no single investment that suddenly made Read rich. That's one reason his story is easy to misunderstand. Headlines often make it sound as though an ordinary janitor somehow discovered a secret investment. The available records suggest something much less dramatic.

Read owned a broad collection of established companies and held onto them for long periods. His stock certificates were reportedly kept in a safe-deposit box. In an era before investors could trade from a phone in seconds, simply leaving investments alone was a much more practical habit.

Read wasn't living on a large salary, so keeping his spending modest allowed more of his money to remain available for investing. Over several decades, small amounts can become much larger when investment returns are allowed to compound.

Most of the money went back to his community

Read's wealth became public after his death, when his will revealed where much of it would go. He left about $4.8 million to Brattleboro Memorial Hospital and another $1.2 million to Brooks Memorial Library. The combined donations were roughly $6 million.

For the people who had known Read as a worker, customer or local resident, the size of those gifts helped reveal another side of his financial life. He hadn't spent his money trying to look wealthy. He had accumulated it quietly and eventually directed much of it toward two local institutions.