She suffered so much. She had so little. Her pain was unbearable. Life had been so cruel to her. So how was she able to die wealthy?

She was poor.

And those who did not know her pitied her.

She was a pauper.

And those who did not know her sadly shook their heads as she walked past, a lonely woman on a lonely street, condemned to wander aimlessly on the wrong side of the tracks on the wrong side of town.

Hetty Green was one of life’s unfortunates.

And she could not escape the misery of her existence.

She never turned on the heat in her room.

She never used hot water.

Heat and hot cost too much.

She owned one dress. It was black. And Hetty wore it every day, never changing the dress or her undergarments until the seams fell apart and the material fell off her shoulders in frayed strips of rotting rags.

Clothes cost too much.

She only washed the dirtiest part of her dress, the hemline, for one reason.

Soap cost too much.

She ate mostly pies, the kind that she could buy for fifteen cents apiece, and she warmed her oatmeal on the radiator of the Seaboard National Bank in New York.

No one bothered her.

They left the poor lady alone.

Those who did not know Hetty grieved for her. They felt so sorry for her.

She suffered so much. She had so little.  Life had been so cruel to her. When her son was a child, he broke a leg, and Hetty carried him to the free clinic for the poor. Even the free clinic rejected her. In time, his leg had to be amputated.

She couldn’t pay for treatments.

Treatments cost too much.

Hetty just did not spend money. What she had, she kept.

After all, she might need another black dress someday.

She did need one the day they buried her, a lonely woman from the lonely streets in a lonely grave.

When she died in 1916, Hetty Green’s net worth was estimated at somewhere just on either side of $200 million. That would be about four billion of today’s dollars.

She would be known as the World’s Greatest Miser.

She would be recognized at the Witch of Wall Street.

She had been, without dispute, the richest woman in the world.

Hetty Green played a man’s game on the stock market, and she played it better than the men.

She had, in fact, never been poor. Her father had owned a large whaling fleet and earned a sizable fortune trading with China. Hetty was reading the financial papers to him by the time she was six years old. She became his bookkeeper at the age of fifteen. And she inherited more than seven million dollars at the time of his death.

She was smart. She was tough. She was shrewd. When others panicked during hard times, Hetty just smiled, stuck to her game plan, and kept raking in money. Others were folding, and she was quite pleased to take the money they were losing.

She invested most of it in Civil War bonds, and she chose the winning bonds issued by the winning side. Hetty put her money in real estate and railroads. Not even she realized how much money she was earning each year.

Only one thing was for certain.

Hetty Green wasn’t about to spend any of it.

She walked in regularly to the Seaboard National Bank in New York, was always able to find an empty desk, and conducted her business in a back corner because she did not want to pay rent.

Rent cost too much.

She never stayed long in one place, sometimes moving weekly from one small apartment in Brooklyn Heights to another in Hoboken. Back and forth she went, making sure she never hung around in one place long enough to arouse the curiosity of tax officials.

Taxes cost too much.

She had no intention of paying them.

She didn’t.

As Hetty grew older, she began to suffer from the affliction of a bad hernia.  The pain was tough, and then it grew unbearable.

“We’ll operate,” the doctor said.

“No, you won’t,” Hetty said.

“Why not?” the doctor asked.

“The operations costs too much,” Hetty said.

She chose the pain. She refused to pay $150 for the doctor to make it go away. But then, what would you expect from a woman who searched through her carriage all night because she had lost a two-cent stamp?

She found it. It was, she thought, a night well spent.

But, alas, Hetty Green died, and much to her consternation, I’m sure, she couldn’t take it with her.

Her daughter stuck a million dollars in the bank and gave the rest of the $200 million to churches and hospitals and colleges.

And her one-legged son?

He swore he would never live the life of a pauper again. He took his inheritance, went out, and promptly bought a diamond-encrusted chamber pot.

That’s life.

That’s the way some people live it.

You can’t make this stuff up.

Many of my true stories can be found in Confessions from the Road. Please click HERE to find the book on Amazon.