Warren Buffett’s Childhood Money Hustles

For many people, Warren Buffett is that “rich stock-picker guy”. But if you read any of his multiple biographies, you would know that he was a very precocious kid that was obsessed with getting rich from an early age. Instead of trying to make the travel team for soccer or hockey, he was constantly learning and trying new ways to make money.

The CNBC article “Here’s how Warren Buffett hustled to make $53,000 as a teenager” lists several of his entrepreneurial projects, from delivering newspapers to running his own pinball machines. They organized them into this infographic:

He also added that extra bit of cleverness. From The Alchemy of Money:

“He also sold calendars to his newspaper customers, and he developed another sideline too. He asked all his customers for their old magazines as scrap paper for the war effort. Then he would check the labels on the magazines to figure out when the subscriptions were expiring, using a code book he had gotten from Moore-Cottrell, the publishing powerhouse that had hired him as an agent to sell magazines. He made a card file of subscribers, and before their subscriptions expired, Warren would be knocking at their door, selling them a new magazine.”

He understood the power of compounding and even bought a much smaller first home than he could afford in order to keep more to invest. Everything just kept building from there. There’s a reason his biography was called The Snowball. Even then, he didn’t become a billionaire until his mid-50s.