Generation Rich

摘要

Jon Burkhart was born during the Great Depression, and like many members of his generation, he couldn't have been luckier. For most of their working lives, he and his wife saved 10 percent of everything they earned. They made some smart investments, but they also rode the postwar economy perfectly. After a 30-year career as a television producer and director in Houston, Burkhart moved in 1987 to Maui, where he and his wife bought a house. They sold it for a 300 percent profit in 2008, and invested most of the money in mutual funds just as the stock market was nearing a 13-year low. Today the 81-year-old Burkhart-in a retirement community in Winston-Salem, N.C.-lives far more comfortably than the elderly folks he knew as a child. "It was the most fortunate timing you could imagine," he says. "There's no way you can plan on that."