Anne Scheiber

Anne Scheiber
Born	1 10, 1893
Died	Template:Death date and age
Nationality	American
Occupation	IRS auditor, investor
Employer	Internal Revenue Service
Known for	Turning $5,000 into $22 million through long-term investing; bequeathing her fortune to Yeshiva University

Anne Scheiber (October 1, 1893 – January 9, 1995) was an American Internal Revenue Service (IRS) auditor and investor who, over a fifty-one-year retirement, transformed a modest $5,000 nest egg into a fortune of approximately $22 million through disciplined, long-term dividend investing. During her twenty-three-year career at the IRS, Scheiber never earned more than $4,000 per year and was never promoted, an experience she attributed in part to gender discrimination and antisemitism. She lived reclusively in a rent-controlled apartment in New York City, spending minimally and reinvesting virtually all of her dividend income. Upon her death at the age of 101, Scheiber stunned the financial world and the academic community by bequeathing her entire estate—valued at $22 million—to Yeshiva University, specifically to fund scholarships for women at Stern College for Women and the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. Her story has since become one of the most frequently cited examples of the power of compound interest and patient, buy-and-hold investing, with several commentators noting that her annualized returns over five decades rivaled or exceeded those of professional fund managers.

Early Life

Anne Scheiber was born on October 1, 1893, in the United States. Little is publicly documented about her earliest years, though available accounts indicate she came from a modest background and was one of several siblings. Her brother was a certified public accountant, and it was through observing his work and career that she developed an early interest in finance and tax law. Scheiber grew up in an era when women faced substantial barriers to professional advancement, particularly in government and finance. She was Jewish, and later in life she expressed the belief that both her gender and her religion had contributed to systemic discrimination she experienced during her career at the IRS.

Despite these obstacles, Scheiber pursued higher education and professional credentials at a time when relatively few women did so. She earned a law degree, which she obtained by attending night school while working during the day. Her legal training, combined with her natural aptitude for numbers and analysis, equipped her with the skills she would later use both in her career as a tax auditor and in her private investment activities. The combination of a legal education and deep familiarity with the tax code would prove instrumental in her approach to building wealth through tax-efficient investing strategies.

Scheiber never married and had no children. She maintained a private and reserved disposition throughout her life, characteristics that would become more pronounced during her decades of retirement. Her personal frugality, which later became a central element of her public story, appears to have been a lifelong trait rooted in her modest upbringing and reinforced by her experiences during the Great Depression and other periods of economic hardship.

Education

Scheiber attended law school at night while simultaneously holding employment during the daytime hours. She successfully completed her legal studies and earned a law degree, an accomplishment that was relatively uncommon for women in the early twentieth century. Her legal education provided her with a detailed understanding of tax law, corporate structures, and financial regulations—knowledge that she applied both professionally as an IRS auditor and personally as an investor. Her brother, who worked as a certified public accountant, may have also served as an informal source of financial education and mentorship during her formative years.

Career

Internal Revenue Service

Anne Scheiber joined the Internal Revenue Service as an auditor and worked there for twenty-three years. During her tenure, she reviewed the tax returns of individuals and businesses, gaining an intimate understanding of how wealthy Americans earned, invested, and preserved their money. This experience proved formative: by examining the financial activities of affluent taxpayers, Scheiber developed a keen awareness of which investment strategies generated reliable, long-term wealth and which were speculative or unsound.

Despite her competence and dedication to her work, Scheiber never received a promotion during her entire career at the IRS. Her salary never exceeded $3,150 per year during most of her career, reaching a maximum of approximately $4,000 annually by the time she retired. She later attributed this stagnation to discrimination based on both her gender and her Jewish heritage, a claim that was consistent with the well-documented systemic biases present in many American government agencies during the mid-twentieth century. The experience of being overlooked and undervalued left a lasting mark on Scheiber. She became deeply distrustful of institutions and developed an independent, self-reliant approach to financial planning that would define her retirement years.

Scheiber retired from the IRS in 1944 at the age of 51. At the time of her retirement, she had accumulated approximately $5,000 in savings—a modest sum even by the standards of the 1940s. She also had a small annual pension from her government service. With no spouse, no children, and no expectation of inheritance, Scheiber faced the prospect of funding what could potentially be a very long retirement on extremely limited resources.

Investment Career

Upon retiring in 1944, Scheiber committed herself to investing her $5,000 in savings in the stock market. This decision came at a time when the memory of the 1929 stock market crash and the Great Depression remained fresh in the American consciousness, and many ordinary citizens remained wary of equities. Scheiber, however, had the advantage of having spent over two decades scrutinizing the financial records of wealthy taxpayers. She had observed firsthand that patient ownership of high-quality stocks—particularly those of well-established companies that paid regular dividends—was among the most reliable paths to wealth accumulation.

Scheiber's investment approach was grounded in several core principles that she adhered to with extraordinary discipline over the next fifty-one years:

Buy and Hold Strategy: Scheiber was an unwavering buy-and-hold investor. Once she purchased shares in a company she believed to be fundamentally sound, she held them for years, often decades, regardless of short-term market fluctuations. She did not attempt to time the market and rarely, if ever, sold her holdings. This approach allowed her investments to compound over extraordinarily long time horizons. By avoiding frequent trading, she also minimized transaction costs and the tax consequences of realizing capital gains—a consideration that, given her expertise as a former tax auditor, was likely deliberate and calculated.

Dividend Reinvestment: A central pillar of Scheiber's strategy was the reinvestment of dividends. Rather than spending the dividend income her stocks generated, she consistently plowed it back into additional shares. Over time, this created a powerful compounding effect, as each reinvested dividend generated its own future dividends, which were in turn reinvested. This snowball effect, sustained over more than five decades, was arguably the single most important factor in transforming her initial $5,000 stake into a $22 million fortune.

Focus on Quality Companies: Scheiber favored shares in large, well-established companies with strong brands, consistent earnings, and a history of paying and increasing dividends. Her portfolio reportedly included holdings in companies such as Schering-Plough, Coca-Cola, Bristol-Myers Squibb, and other major corporations. She gravitated toward companies whose products she personally used or whose business models she understood, an approach that paralleled the investment philosophy later popularized by Warren Buffett's dictum to invest in what you know.

Tax Efficiency: Scheiber's deep knowledge of the tax code, gained through her career at the IRS, informed her investment decisions. By holding stocks for the long term rather than trading frequently, she minimized her capital gains tax liability. The buy-and-hold approach meant that most of her gains remained unrealized—and therefore untaxed—for decades, allowing the full power of compounding to work unimpeded. This tax-efficient strategy was a sophisticated element of her approach that many professional investors of her era did not employ as consistently.

Extreme Frugality: Scheiber lived in the same rent-controlled apartment in New York City for decades, spending as little as possible on personal expenses. She did not own a car, did not travel, and reportedly wore the same clothes until they were threadbare. Her rent-controlled apartment ensured that her housing costs remained minimal even as New York City real estate prices soared around her. By keeping her living expenses to an absolute minimum, she was able to reinvest nearly all of her dividend income and pension into her portfolio.

No Special Advantages: Commentators have repeatedly emphasized that Scheiber achieved her results without any of the advantages typically associated with wealthy investors. She had no special connections to Wall Street, no access to insider information, no significant inheritance, and no high salary. She did not use leverage, options, or any exotic financial instruments. Her fortune was built entirely through the application of basic investing principles executed with exceptional patience and discipline.

Over the fifty-one years from 1944 to 1995, Scheiber's portfolio grew from $5,000 to approximately $22 million. This represented an annualized return that financial analysts have calculated to be in the range of 15 to 18 percent, a rate of return that compares favorably with many of the most celebrated professional investors of the twentieth century, including Warren Buffett. The comparison to Buffett, while imperfect given differences in scale and methodology, has nonetheless become a recurring theme in popular financial journalism's treatment of Scheiber's story.

Personal Life

Anne Scheiber lived an intensely private and reclusive life, particularly during her decades of retirement. She never married and had no children. She resided in a rent-controlled apartment in New York City, where she remained for the duration of her retirement. The apartment, described in various accounts as modest and sparsely furnished, reflected her commitment to frugality above all else.

Scheiber had few social connections and was not known to have close friends during her later years. She was reportedly suspicious of others and deeply private about her financial affairs. Her neighbors and the few people who interacted with her had no idea that the elderly woman living so modestly in their building was sitting on a fortune worth millions of dollars. She did not discuss her investments with others, and the full extent of her wealth was not known publicly until after her death.

Her reclusiveness appears to have been shaped in part by the professional disappointments she experienced at the IRS, where she felt she had been unfairly denied advancement. This sense of injustice, particularly the feeling that she had been discriminated against as a woman and as a Jewish person, stayed with her throughout her life and influenced her decision about how to distribute her wealth after death.

Despite her frugal lifestyle, Scheiber was an avid reader and maintained a sharp intellect well into her later years. She followed the stock market closely, reading financial publications and annual reports, and made her own investment decisions without the assistance of a financial advisor for most of her investing career.

Anne Scheiber died on January 9, 1995, at the age of 101.

Recognition

Bequest to Yeshiva University

The most dramatic revelation of Scheiber's life came after her death, when it was disclosed that she had bequeathed her entire estate—valued at approximately $22 million—to Yeshiva University. The donation was specifically directed to fund scholarships for women at Stern College for Women and at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, both affiliated with Yeshiva University. Scheiber's decision to leave her fortune to support the education of women was widely interpreted as a response to the gender-based discrimination she had experienced throughout her own career. By funding scholarships for women pursuing higher education and medical training, she sought to provide opportunities that she herself had been denied.

The bequest was one of the largest individual gifts Yeshiva University had received at that time and had a transformative impact on the institution's scholarship programs. By 2007, the gift was already helping to fund full scholarships for Stern College graduates who had been accepted into the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, enabling young women to pursue medical degrees without the burden of significant educational debt. Recipients of the Scheiber scholarships have included students from across the United States, and the fund has continued to support new generations of women in medicine and other fields.

Media and Financial Commentary

Scheiber's story attracted significant media attention following the disclosure of her bequest. The New York Times published a detailed profile in December 1995, and People magazine ran a feature on her life under the headline "Angel in Disguise." In the years since, her story has been cited in numerous books, articles, and financial education materials as a case study in the power of long-term compounding, dividend reinvestment, and disciplined investing.

Financial commentators have drawn comparisons between Scheiber's investment returns and those of Warren Buffett, with some noting that her annualized returns over five decades were comparable to or exceeded those of the famed Berkshire Hathaway chairman over similar periods. While such comparisons involve significant methodological caveats—Buffett managed vastly larger sums and operated in a fundamentally different investment context—the comparison has served to underscore the remarkable nature of Scheiber's achievement as an individual, self-directed investor with no professional training in money management.

Her story has been featured by major financial publications including The Motley Fool, Yahoo Finance, and The Globe and Mail, among others, often in the context of articles advocating for long-term, patient investment strategies accessible to ordinary investors.

Legacy

Anne Scheiber's legacy operates on two distinct but interrelated levels: as a philanthropist who made a transformative gift to women's education, and as an exemplar of individual investment success achieved through patience, discipline, and the application of basic financial principles.

Her bequest to Yeshiva University has had a lasting and measurable impact. The scholarships funded by her estate have enabled dozens of women to pursue medical education and other advanced degrees without the financial barriers that might otherwise have prevented them from doing so. In this respect, Scheiber's legacy directly addresses the inequities she experienced in her own professional life, creating opportunities for women in fields where they have historically been underrepresented.

As an investor, Scheiber has become one of the most frequently cited examples in popular financial literature of what can be achieved through compound interest and a buy-and-hold strategy. Her story is regularly invoked in discussions of dividend growth investing, tax-efficient portfolio management, and the importance of starting to invest early and maintaining a long time horizon. The simplicity of her approach—buying shares in high-quality companies, reinvesting dividends, and avoiding unnecessary trading—has made her story particularly resonant with ordinary investors who may feel that wealth accumulation is beyond their reach.

Her story also serves as a commentary on the intersection of gender, institutional discrimination, and economic self-determination in twentieth-century America. Denied advancement in her government career, Scheiber found an alternative path to financial independence through the stock market—an arena where her gender and religion posed no formal barriers to participation. That she ultimately amassed a fortune many times greater than what she could have earned through a lifetime of salaried employment represents a form of vindication that she ensured would benefit others facing similar obstacles.

The continued prominence of Scheiber's story in financial media decades after her death testifies to its enduring power as a narrative about individual agency, patience, and the democratizing potential of stock market investing.