Ninety-eight-year-old Verna Oller passed away on May 10, leaving a hole in her community of Long Beach, Washington. It’s a hole big enough for an indoor swimming pool– the community’s first. You see, Verna Oller left the town a fortune of $4.5 million to build that swimming pool. The gift came as a shock to many who had no idea just how wealthy Oller was. They knew she was frugal alright. She cut her own hair, used an old zipper when her shoelace broke, and bought thrift store clothes. “There was no reason to go buy new clothes if there were good ones at the thrift store,” Carolyn Glenn said in a report by ABC News. “So that’s where she bought a lot of her clothes.”
Oller didn’t earn a big salary. She worked filleting fish until she was in her 70s. But in her spare time she studied investing. “She went to the library and read Barrons,” Guy Glenn told ABC. “She read the Wall Street Journal.” And often read it secondhand after friends were done reading their copies. She didn’t want to pay for a subscription. Her frugal ways combined with her savvy investing created a fortune worth $4.5 million. Oller wanted all of it spent on her home town. “She wants a swimming pool to be built, that was her main goal,” Glenn told ABC.
Oller wanted a pool for her town because she was often frustrated by the fact that kids had no place to swim even though Long Beach is situated on the ocean. The water is too dangerous for kids. Some of the money will also go towards scholarships and assistance for local teachers. “I think we could learn a lot from her,” Andrea Nooman, a nursing home owner, told ABC.
Tags: Oller, Millionaire, frugal, ABC News, Verna Oller
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