Anne Scheiber, a woman from Brooklyn, New York, was born in 1893. She went on to become a finance legend.
Scheiber overcame many obstacles during her 23-year career with the Internal Revenue Service. When she retired at 51 in 1944, she had just $5,000 to her name.
She taught herself everything she could about the stock market and investing. By the end of her life, she had turned $5,000 into $22 million, becoming a self-made millionaire.
Who was Anne Scheiber?
Scheiber was born and raised in Brooklyn, according to The New York Times. Her father died when she was young, and her mother worked in real estate to support the family. Scheiber was well educated, attending secretarial school before studying bookkeeping and law.
She spent most of her career as an estate auditor with the IRS. Never married, Scheiber supported herself on a $4,000 salary, yet she never received a single promotion during her entire career.
“She was always on top of production,” Ben Clark, her lawyer, told NYT. in 1995. “Yet in her mind, women always got the short end of the stick.”
In 1944, at 51, she retired. With more free time, she threw herself into learning everything she could about the stock market and investing.
How Scheiber built her wealth
“She did nothing but study the market,” Clark said. “When you add it all up, she was the most unusual person I ever knew in my life.”
Scheiber built a stock portfolio of more than 100 companies, including Coca-Cola, Paramount, and Schering-Plough.
“Analyzing earnings reports, management philosophy and product quality, she bought into a variety of industrial companies and other blue chips,” NYT reported. “Her investment strategies were simple, if not old-fashioned. Forget about market highs and lows on any given day, month or year. Reinvest your dividends. Hang tough and seldom sell.”
William Fay, her broker at Merrill Lynch, also shared more about her investing strategy with NYT.
“She was never looking for a quick buck,” he said. “Her whole idea was to get performance on a long-term basis. She felt over the long run the value would grow.”
She even earned comparisons to finance mogul Warren Buffett.
“You think Warren Buffett, you know, that guy, was good at this sort of thing?” Clark said. “She ran rings around Warren Buffett.”
Scheiber’s inspiring legacy
She lived a quiet, modest life in a rent-stabilized studio apartment on West 56th Street in New York City. Her apartment “was bereft of luxuries: paint was peeling, the furniture was old and dust covered the bookcases. She walked everywhere, often in the same black coat and matronly hat,” per NYT.
Scheiber died in January 1995 at the age of 101. In her will, she left a stunning $22 million to Yeshiva University, which established the Anne Scheiber Scholarship. Scheiber hoped the fund would help Jewish women because of the “discrimination she felt she had encountered during 23 years with the I.R.S.”
The scholarship is still active today. In 2007, scholarship recipient Shulamit Roditi-Kulak said, “It’s unbelievably humbling to hear the story of Anne Scheiber and how she made her money, only to give it away to people she would never meet.”
