I’m pretty sure that vampires are not real. You may have a different opinion, but I have never met one personally, and I am fairly certain you haven’t either.
Vampire legends are as old as the Romans. The most famous vampire, Count Dracula, is an invention from the imagination of Bram Stoker. Stoker was the theater manager at the Lyceum in London. He wrote his famous Gothic novel, titled merely “Dracula,” in his spare time in 1897. Stoker wrote some other things as well including a biography of his boss, Henry Irving. None of them are as well remembered as Bram’s tale of a blood-sucking 15th century count from Transylvania.
The character of Count Dracula was based on a real-life historical figure known as Vlad the Impaler. Vlad III was the prince of Wallachia, a small principality on the outskirts of what would become the Austro-Hungarian Empire, nestled in the elbow of the Transylvanian Alps. Today, it is part of Romania.
Vlad the Third was of the House of Dracul, and he ruled Wallachia on three separate occasions in the 15th century. He was deposed twice. The name Dracul means “Dragon.” Vlad Dracul earned his nickname, “the Impaler,” because of his propensity to impale his rivals and opponents.
He was particularly harsh on the Turks who were invading Europe at the time. He impaled hundreds, if not thousands of Turkish prisoners on sharp stakes and left their corpses to rot, earning him his gruesome nickname. Many of his most heinous acts were first reported in a play that was written during Vlad’s lifetime entitled, “Story of a Bloodthirsty Madman Called Dracula of Wallachia.”
What fascinates me most about Count Dracula, the vampire, as portrayed in the popular culture, is that he is always rich. Why? Because he lives forever. If you lived forever, you would be rich too. Given enough time and even a frugal rate of interest, your assets would grow into an immense fortune. A paltry $10, invested at 5 percent per annum for 400 years grows to almost $3 billion. If you then added another dollar per year to that investment, you would add an additional $6 billion to your nest egg. Simple saving and compounding over a long period of time is an astoundingly powerful tool.
People, ordinary people, do not live for hundreds of years. We do not live forever. Perhaps that is why we have felt the need to create organizations that do. Governments are designed to live forever and many live for centuries. “We the people,” created the government of the United States over 200 years ago. When we think about entities that live forever, the church immediately comes to mind. The Roman Catholic Church is worth so many billions of dollars that the number is difficult, if not impossible, to calculate and one could argue that they were not even trying to get wealthy! The church basically accumulated assets, like real estate and art, and then held those assets over an extremely long period of time.
Another entity that is designed to live forever is a corporation. Bass Ale owns one of the oldest trademarks in the world. Bass’ red triangle has been on their bottles and barrels of ale since shortly after the brewery was founded in 1777. One-hundred years later, Bass was the largest brewer in the world producing over a million barrels per year. Today, Bass is owned by the same Dutch Company that owns Budweiser. The entire conglomerate is worth around $140 billion. That is a lot of money, but modest compared to the value of other corporations in existence today. Apple Inc., a relative newcomer to the world of corporations, recently made headlines when their total market value set a record by exceeding the $1 trillion mark.
General Electric was founded by Thomas Edison and J.P. Morgan in 1892. The company has fallen on hard times in the past several years, but for well over a century, long after Edison and Morgan were dead, the company was a stalwart of the U.S. stock market. The Coca-Cola corporation is even older. John Pemberton founded the company in his pharmacy in 1886. Both Candler and the pharmacy are long gone, but the company he started is still around and still selling billions of dollars of beverages every year.
Some people argue that corporations have too much power. They’re right! They do. That is why we must invest in them. We mere mortals need to invest in the entities that live longer than we do. Our lives are finite. Corporations will continue to gain wealth and assets long after our useful lives have ended. If you invest early enough and often enough, you can create, not only sufficient wealth for your life, but a legacy for future generations as well.
Scott A. Grant is the president of Standfast Asset Management in Ponte Vedra Beach. In addition to managing assets for individuals in the community, he is an author, columnist, historian and speaker.
