What I think of as a “good” amount of money has changed. In the ’80s, the target was to become a millionaire. Then you hit 50-plus and maintaining health and happiness becomes the focus – money is a distant third. My everyday car on the Central Coast these days is a 20-year-old LandCruiser, which I’ll drive until the day I die.
I taught my kids to remain humble and polite. They got the bare minimum in pocket money, but the opportunity to earn more with chores. I expected them to save some of it because hard days may be around the corner.
Money hasn’t changed me much. I live a very basic but healthy and happy life. The money I’ve accumulated over the years through relentless hard work is pretty much unimportant to my family, but it does give us security. It allows me to ensure that all the immediate members of my family have the bare essentials in life, which
I find satisfying. If I was down to my last $10, I’d save it – and start working 16 hours a day, seven days a week as I did from 15 to 55 years old.
Jack Cowin
He founded Hungry Jack’s after emigrating from his native Canada as a 27-year-old in 1969. Now also a major shareholder of Domino’s Pizza, Cowin is valued at $4.9 billion and is No. 23 on 2024’s Rich List.
Jack Cowin: “I have four kids and they’ve all worked for Hungry Jack’s from an early age.”
My mother and father were from families of nine and 10 kids growing up in the Depression. My first 10 years were in a two-bedroom state-owned house. My sister and I had bunk beds, and in the morning my Uncle Herb, who worked night shifts, would take my bed. I never experienced financial hardship growing up but I’m sure my parents’ tough upbringing influenced me as to the importance of money. I don’t ever remember getting any pocket money, I was out doing odd jobs in the neighbourhood and developing a sense of pride in being independent.
I had an early start in entrepreneurship. In high school I had a daily paper route with 100 customers. Lawn cutting in summer, snow shovelling in winter. Then in uni I had a job selling nursery stock from farm to farm. I discovered I excelled at selling – I made more money from that summer job than my professors, who weren’t happy about that as the word spread. My first big splurge came from the success of my summer job – a two-seater sports car, the Sunbeam Alpine. I bought a Ford Mustang when they were introduced in 1964.
I have four kids and they’ve all worked for Hungry Jack’s from an early age, to teach them the value of a dollar and job discipline. They’ve had the benefit of coming from parents who led a relatively conservative lifestyle, with the focus on funds going into building a business rather than spending on luxury.
I don’t think money has changed me. It’s given me the privilege of being able to learn from other successful people through association. My primary drive has always been building a successful business, employing thousands of people and the satisfaction of seeing them improve their lives. That said, we are all wired differently. I am sure that there are people who become instantly wealthy and change.
If I was down to my last $10, I think I’d be worried about my next meal. I’d head to Hungry Jack’s for a Whopper with cheese, to tide me over long enough to think about where the next $10 was going to come from.
Erin Deering
Deering co-founded the Triangl swimwear brand with former partner Craig Ellis. Their bikinis became a viral hit and the pair made the Financial Review Young Rich List in 2019 with a $35 million valuation.
Erin Deering: “A mantra of mine is ‘money makes people funny’.”
My parents were both workers with a serious, restrained relationship to money. My first job was as a waitress, earning about $60 a shift. I think my first splurge was a leather handbag from Mimco. Money has changed my life in every single way. I started a business at 27, and it went very well – and I suddenly had a lot more money than I ever expected I’d have. My life changed so quickly as a result, and I took years to adjust to my new normal! I do think that money changes people. A mantra of mine is “money makes people funny”.
Cathie Reid
Reid, with husband Stuart Giles, founded the Epic Pharmacy chain and the cancer care provider Icon Group. They joined the Rich List in 2020 but they missed this year’s list. Their fortune is estimated at $616 million.
Cathie Reid: “Just because you play by the rules doesn’t mean you won’t lose.”
A lot of people are awkward, even apologetic talking about money. But the more we talk about money, the easier it gets. And we need to talk about it; salary negotiations, the gender pay gap, all of that sort of thing – that is money.
Having money certainly changes people’s attitudes towards you. I tell women, if you’ve worked hard and you want to reward yourself for your success with something tangible, go for it. And if you see someone else doing that and you find yourself judging her, think about whether you’d judge them if they were a man. There’s still a view that what is acceptable for men is somewhat crass for women. I have those internal checks that I have to work against. You have to train yourself out of that mindset.
My first splurge was a Chanel bag, which I bought in 2012 when we sold a manufacturing business. The decision to sell hadn’t been an easy one for me, and it was nice to have a tangible positive reminder of the transaction. I’ve still got that bag and it will always be important to me because of those memories.
My parents worked very hard. Dad had a million side hustles and changed his circumstances. It was expected that we would work hard but it turned out my risk appetite was significantly greater than my parents. They believed, if you haven’t got the money, you save. When Stuart and I were in debt buying the first of the pharmacy businesses, Dad wanted to know how quickly it would pay off. It’s probably fortunate he died before the GFC because we were then $35 million in debt.
My attitudes to money were probably disrupted by my high school sweetheart, who I married and who turned out to be . . . not such a sweetheart. I played by the rules and did everything right and my life still got turned on its head. That changed my pathway from conservative to more risk-amenable. It taught me I could tear up the rules a little, because there is no certainty. Just because you play by the rules doesn’t mean you won’t lose.
Max Beck
Beck is a carpenter turned property developer and founder of the Becton Group. He is valued at $1.1 billion and is No. 141 on 2024’s Rich List.
Max Beck: “All money does is give you more choices.”
My kids have all got nice houses, but it would really hurt me if someone said, “your kids are a bit arrogant”. I can’t stand that. They should conduct themselves as real people and not plastic people.
My wife still goes to the op shop. Someone was trying to order me a helicopter to come down to Sorrento and she said, “if you get one of those, I’ll leave you”. We have nice houses and things . . . but I drive a Ford truck. I do the shopping and the cooking now and I say, “oh I just bought a chicken at the supermarket, it was only $15. We’ll get two nights out of that!”
All money does is give you more choices. I’m not living any differently now to what I lived 40 or 50 years ago, really. I like my real friends and I’ve got mates I’ve had for 50 years and they’re not going to want to hang with me if I’m a wanker.
Mark Carnegie
Carnegie is the guy everyone thinks is on the Rich List – yet he never actually has been. The investment banker, and son of former Rio Tinto boss Roderick Carnegie, is these days perhaps best known as an evangelist for cryptocurrency.
Mark Carnegie: “The fact is lots of rich people are miserable.”
As a child of privilege, I have been extraordinarily fortunate. In my family, the narrative was that we could be happier if we had more money. That drove me to focus on making money and so to pursue an entrepreneurial path rather than a professional or political one. I ended up getting bored with making money pretty quickly, but I held the idea that it would make me happy for a long time.
In my 30s and 40s, I spent time figuring out what would make a full and rich life. Andrew Oswald, a researcher focused on the correlation between money and happiness, found that beyond $50,000 per year of income – now it would be $150,000 – there was basically no correlation between happiness and financial success.
I don’t agree with him completely as there is no doubt money is a facilitator and so does help to live a good life but it very quickly turns you into a hamster on a wheel. Two bonus cycles at an investment bank gets you on a hedonic treadmill of want, want, want. You need the BMW and then you need the 7 Series. You need the eastern suburbs house. These are all social signifiers, they do not mean anything.
As a rich parent you have a choice with your kids, you can get them to follow the incentives of the financialised market or you can try to support other choices. I don’t want a situation where one of the kids says, I want to do social impact work in Africa, and then risks never being able to buy a house. That doesn’t feel to me to be the right thing to do. They got the memo that we don’t want them not to work and study. They are all productively engaged and getting along.
I am trying to bend the arc of the world in a positive way, recognising it is imperfect, I am flawed, and I can only do a very small amount to make the world better. But a small amount is far better than nothing and you have that obligation. The idea that I’m going to spend my life apologising for being lucky? No. If you sit on one of the winning lottery tickets of life and you’re miserable, that’s a destructive thing to do. I have seen it eat people up. Would I have rather been born in rural Zambia? I’ve been there, and no. Being born in Australia with parents who gave me an education and money for a house deposit was the greatest luck.
I try to do high-impact philanthropy. I know everyone thinks crypto is bullshit but the potential for it to advance the human condition is real. You need to give, and you need to give material amounts. But I don’t believe you need to give it all away. I try and balance all the different elements – giving to my kids, giving to the community and doing the things I want to do.
I’ve seen money change people for the worse – there’s a thing I call billionaire’s disease, where you allow yourself to be removed from the world and surround yourself with yes men. The fact is lots of rich people are miserable. Some people never learn to start making money, but some people never learn to stop.
Wes Maas
Maas is the founder and CEO of the ASX-listed construction materials, equipment and services provider Maas Group. The former Rabbitohs NRL player is valued at $814 million and is No. 176 on 2024’s Rich List.
Wes Maas: “I want to make sure that my kids are hungry, because I’ve always been hungry.”
Living in Dubbo, it’s an advantage. We have a nice house, but I built it 12 years ago. We have been able to buy a home in Sydney, but we still live in Dubbo. We don’t have a $60 million house on the water. The dearest house here is $1.5 million. I want to make sure that my kids are hungry, because I’ve always been hungry. Then they get a sense of satisfaction or achievement when they achieve things. We don’t intend to give the kids everything, but it’s hard not to do nice things or go out for dinner in nice places when you are lucky.
Robert Whyte
Whyte is a professional investor and confidante of the late Kerry Packer. He is valued at $989 million and is No. 155 on 2024’s Rich List.
Robert Whyte: “I’d have been a lot better with debt, I would have made more money.”
We have no debt in the family office, which I think is rare. That was shaped by my upbringing largely, my parents were conservative and didn’t have debt, they bought the house when they could afford it without debt and I did the same. I’d have been a lot better with debt, I would have made more money.
Looking back, I think it was a mistake but it’s too late to change now. I would say to my family now to be careful about the people you deal with and who you surround yourself with in the commercial world.
We have a lot of joint ventures with people and apart from one, they’ve all been very happy. It just comes down to doing really detailed analysis of whether you feel comfortable with people.
Ian Malouf
Malouf founded Dial-a-Dump in 1984, with a single flatbed truck and a shovel. He sold the waste management business to Bingo Industries in 2019 for $577 million. He is valued at $1.15 billion and is No. 135 on 2024’s Rich List.
Ian Malouf: “There’s a lot of people who don’t want to work. And that means great opportunities for people who do want to work.”
I tell my kids, “my money is not your freedom”, and they get that. Make your own thing, because then you’re proud of it. I rip through it like a man with no arms anyway – I’m not leaving much! What Warren Buffett says is right – money is the scorecard. I laugh when people say money’s not important. It’s the one thing that lets you do what you like, when you like.
I missed a significant amount of my childhood, I missed 21sts, because I’d be working Saturday nights, Sunday mornings. But I did that when I was young, when I could do it, and I socked plenty away because money makes money. And now I get to fully enjoy the pay-off. As I say to my kids, there’s a lot of people who don’t want to work. And that means great opportunities for people who do want to work.
The Rich List issue of AFR Magazine is out on Friday, May 31 inside The Australian Financial Review. Follow AFR Mag on Instagram.
