Sisyphus (1548–49) by Titian, Prado Museum, Madrid, Spain
An 1880 painting by Jean-Eugène Buland showing a stark contrast in socioeconomic status
Adapted from From Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
Police said that wanted-to-look-rich businessman Rakesh Kamal shot to death his wife, Teena, and daughter, Arianna, and then killed himself at their 27-room mansion in Dover, Mass., the state’s richest town, on Dec. 26. (This being America, he apparently had no problem obtaining an unregistered gun.)
The couple, both of whom were entrepreneurs in education-sector ventures, some of which went sour, were in deep financial trouble, especially after paying about $4 million for the estate, with a $3.8 million mortgage (!) in 2019, reported The Boston Globe. (Different media have somewhat different numbers for some of the Kamals’ finances; The Globe has done the most reporting on this so far.)_
As The Globe reported, the mortgage was supposed to have been repaid in full by February, 2021, but by then the Kamals still owed $3.6 million and hundreds of thousands of dollars in related real-estate costs. The Kamals, bailing hard, took out a second mortgage of about $1.5 million in 2022, but an outfit called Wilsondale Associates foreclosed on the property in December, 2022 , with the couple still owing $3 million. They were bankrupt, but they continued to live in the mansion, under some mysterious arrangement.
So the family was apparently under great stress – stress they put themselves into. (I also noted that Arianna, the daughter, was sent to the expensive and elite Milton Academy although the Dover-Sherborn School District is ranked among the best in the nation.)\
Anxiously trying to keep up with the Joneses – or the Bezoses – can all too often lead to disaster in our status-obsessed nation. Chasing the American dream can end in a nightmare. Paging Jay Gatsby and gold-gilded Donald Trump.
Of course, most people want to live well, and the “finer things in life” are nice to have. But a craving for luxury and social status can become imprisoning, too. If you want to live a manorial lifestyle, don’t trap yourself by trying to do it on a mountain of borrowed money.
It’s worth reading John Bogle’s (1929-2019) book Enough: True Measures of Money, Business, and Life. Mr. Bogle pioneered low-cost investing via the index funds of Vanguard Group, which he founded. While he died a rich man (with about an $80 million estate), he could have made tens of billions. Instead, he basically gave away his Vanguard Funds to its investors, and much money to various charities.
He lived in a modest four-bedroom house in a Philadelphia suburb, and often commented on the corrosive effects of status seeking and greed, and warned that many in the financial-services sector took more wealth from the American economy than they created.
