Investing

Warren Buffet Story PART 5 | Childhood Favorite Game: Make Money!

What was your favorite game during your childhood? Some liked playing video games. But for Warren Buffett as a child, it was making money!

Let's learn about what Warren Buffett's childhood was like and how he thought about business.

 

As you may remember from previous articles, the U.S. stock market crashed in 1929.

Warren Buffett was born on August 30, 1930, which was the year with the highest suicide rate in the history of the United States. The market was so bad that when Warren Buffett was one year old, the securities firm where his father Howard worked collapsed, and Howard had to work with a friend from his old job to create Buffett-Ford Securities. 

Howard was extremely frugal in order to provide for a family of five; a quality that Warren Buffett learned from his father's example and that also helped to shape his good habits throughout his life.

 

Although the family's income was insufficient for a long time, Howard never considered giving up. He also avoided expressing any negative feelings in front of the kids in order to avoid influencing Buffett. Leila Buffett, Warren Buffett's mother, persisted in advising her son and others to eat fewer meals each day and stick to filling meals in order to save money.

To further save money, Leila saves 29 cents in transportation costs by not going to church on Sundays. Buffett saw the fearful eyes of many adults and the depression of the time as a child, which left a lasting impression on his impressionable mind despite the fact that his parents did not express their negative emotions.

 

Buffett would only collect bottle caps that were discarded at a time when most children consumed soda and would carefully sort, count, and determine which store sold the most soda.

We now know that since he was a young boy, Warren Buffett has been fascinated by numbers. While playing with his friends on tall buildings, he would record the license plate numbers of vehicles coming and going. He would also play memory-testing games, such as asking how many people lived in a city when his friends mentioned its name. 

He also checked out the alphabetical number combinations that appear in newspapers and liked to play with a metal money changer toy to change money. All these fascinated him, and he thought it was the most fun game of his childhood.

Buffett started going to Omaha's Rose Hill Elementary School in 1936 when he was six years old. He was able to live a reasonably normal life at that time because the family's financial situation had started to slowly improve. He started purchasing six Coca-Cola cartons for 25 cents from the Omaha grocery store run by his grandfather and selling them for 5 cents each. This indicates that Buffett received 5 cents for each case sold.

Even Warren Buffett's mother praised him for his actions, and if you own stock in Berkshire Hathaway, you've likely heard Buffett say this in his annual shareholder report:

The way I actually experienced retailing as a child opened my eyes to the possibility of many products.

That wasn't the only thing he was selling at the age of six. In the busier areas, where there were more people and people with money, he would also sell gum at his doorstep or lemonade, and he would go there. Little Buffett actually believes that this is more than just a pastime because he is aware of how hard his parents work and wants to help ease their burden. To make his parents' labors less strenuous, he made a wish for himself: to become wealthy.

 

Six-year-old Warren Buffett has already demonstrated his business savvy and provided us with insight into his business sales models and way of thinking.

Let's continue to learn from Warren Buffett. When he grows up, how will he change and grow?

We'll share more about that in the next article!

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