Heard about the secret millionaire of Lake Forest, Illinois? I’ll assume not and recap. Grace Groner was born in 1909 and graduated from Lake Forest College in 1931, just about the worst year of the 20th Century to enter the job market. Luckily for her, she landed a position as a secretary at the then 
obscure firm Abbott Laboratories. She was a secretary there her entire career, retiring at age 65 in 1974. She never married and lived modestly.
So far, it’s a story that could be called poignantly mundane. But add in a few more facts and it transforms into a personal finance parable that will be repeated, and probably distorted, for some time to come.
In 1935 Groner bought three shares of her employer’s stock. From that day on, she reinvested the dividends and never sold a share. She past passed away this January, having reached 100. Her estate, including what is now a $7 million position in Abbott, was left to her alma mater, Lake Forest College.
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I have a favorite, although rather obscure, Monty Python sketch. An older housewife type (a "pepperpot") sits on a park bench. Another approaches dragging a car engine on a cart, saying she’s been shopping.
"Did you buy anything?" asks the first.
"A piston engine!"
"What d’you buy that for?"
"Oooh! It was a bargain."
It’s not their most memorable bit. But it deftly sums up a way in which we can short circuit our own thinking when we shop.
As I’ve written here several times, when we shop we are not creatures of cold calculation. We can’t be. There are just too many choices at the mall and not enough time to find the one optimal allocation of our money over everything we could buy. Instead, we operate on a set of learned behaviors that approximate the optimal outcome. One of those is bargain hunting.
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The Great Recession began, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research, on December 1, 2007. But it didn’t become Great until September 15, 2008. That’s the day Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy and when what might have been a garden variety slowdown became an all-out panic on Wall 
Street.
Now that the GR seems to be abating, and on the occasion of the first anniversary of the meltdown, journalists, pundits, and even bloggers have spent a lot of time lately summarizing the lessons we have learned from the experience.
Phillip Moeller at US News & World Report gave us 6 Money Lessons of the Great Recession. The first is that "the experts are often wrong." Apparently many used to think that the term expert meant an omniscient seer of the future. Moeller also tells us that "everything is negotiable."
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From some spam I got yesterday:
Dear Amazon.com Customer,
As someone who has shown interest in books and magazines on cooking, you might like to know that you can get a $5.00 instant discount on SmartMoney this month.
I’m not entirely sure what is going on here. It’s possible that it’s just a mail-merge typo, that the text "cooking" was accidentally put in where Amazon meant to write "finance and investing." I like eating as much as the next guy, but describing me as somebody "who has shown interest in books and magazines on cooking" is quite a reach. On the other hand, I do keep buying books about finance, so flogging SmartMoney to me makes some sense.
But there is another, less likely, explanation that I would rather was true. I would rather that the algorithms at Amazon that tell them that people who bought A might like to buy B have found that personal finance and cooking/nutrition/dieting are similar topics with similar audiences.
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A few days ago there was an encouraging little post on The Wallet about how we’re spending more on life’s smaller luxuries in the face of the Great Recession. I call it encouraging because I think it is the direction most people should go in their spending, more on the small stuff, less on the big things, 
and I like reading positive articles about how consumers are doing this. Not that I really think this is going on.
My theory, admittedly not based on much science, is that we’re happier if we spend more on the smaller things we like than on the big things. A great big house may indeed add joy to our lives, but not as much as the equivalent in nights out on the town. (Or rounds of golf, or manicures or whatever floats your boat.)
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obscure firm Abbott Laboratories. She was a secretary there her entire career, retiring at age 65 in 1974. She never married and lived modestly.
Frugality, Media | Frank Curmudgeon | 
March 9, 2010 12:59 pm | 
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