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Age is just a number. No one demonstrates that concept better than the following multi-millionaires who built their fortune after the age of 65. They prove that success can come at any age, and you can truly accomplish any goal at any time of your life.
Some of our most successful millionaires didn’t gain their wealth until after they had turned 65 , well after retirement age in most countries. Who are they, and how did they do it? Here are just a few of the most successful multi-millionaires who made their money after age 65.
Why Are We Talking About This?
Just some money.
Too often we think it’s too late to find our passion, be ‘successful’, or make something of ourselves. When we get caught up in the rat race, we often compare our position to the success of others and feel like failures. The good news is, that success is a personal journey. But if you’re dead set on becoming a millionaire, the good news is that there’s still plenty of time. And we found a few people to prove it.
#1 Grandma Moses
A Grandma Moses painting.
- Life : (1860–1961)
- Net Worth: $1 million
Anna Mary Robertson Moses (Grandma Moses) was a painter. Moses grew up on a farm in New York, and once old enough, worked as a hired girl as well as working on her family’s farm. As a child, she used berry juice as paint to enhance her pencil-drawn images on old newspapers. Her artistry was encouraged by her father. After marrying her husband when she was 27, the couple moved to Virginia where she continued farming. The couple raised 5 children together before the death of her husband. She started painting at the age of 77 because her arthritis prevented her from creating worsted embroidery art. She also started painting because she needed to “keep busy and out of mischief.”
After a period of copying other photos, she started to paint scenes from her childhood. She started selling her paintings and prize-winning pickles at country fairs. She was discovered when an art collector saw her paintings hanging in the window of a drugstore. He bought the remaining 15 paintings she had in stock. Three of her paintings appeared in a show, “Contemporary, Unknown Painters,” at the Museum of Modern Art.
A Long Life
Her next show in 1940, featured 35 of her paintings and was held at the Galerie St. Etienne. Around that time, Hallmark purchased the rights to create greeting cards from her reproduced images. This led to Grandma Moses becoming a household name. She became famous for painting in the style of Naïve In her own, “American Primitive.” From the time she started painting at 77 until the time of her death at the age of 101, she had painted around 2,000 pieces. Her paintings mostly depicted old rural American life, and her memories of the farm and town she grew up in. Her work was shown in 100 group exhibits and 150 solo shows throughout her life.
Primitive American Naïve is described as having a purity of color, vigor, and attention to detail. Some of her most famous works are Black Horses (1942), Catching the Thanksgiving Turkey (1943), Apple Pickers (1940), and Making Apple Butter (1958). Her work was often reproduced for Christmas cards.
#2 Colonel Harland Sanders
Colonel Harland Sanders.
- Life : (1890–1980)
- Net Worth: $3.5 Million
Colonel Harland David Sanders isn’t only the face of Kentucky Fried Chicken with his black string ties, white goatee, and white suits. He also started the Southern Chicken franchise, which started out in a café in Kentucky during the Great Depression. He was born in Henryville, Indiana, and died in Selbyville, Kentucky at the age of 90. He was described in his biography by John Ed Pearce as having encountered “repeated failure largely through bullheadedness, a lack of self-control, impatience, and a self-righteous lack of diplomacy.”
His parents were Wilbur and Margaret Sanders. His father was a farmer, and then a butcher after falling and breaking his leg. After his father died in 1895, his mother worked in a tomato cannery, and being the oldest of three children, Harland was responsible for cooking and caring for his siblings beginning at the age of 5. His mother would be gone for days at a time for work, and the children were in charge of feeding themselves when she was away.
Drop Out
After his mother married her third husband, William Broaddus, she moved the family to Greenwood, Indiana in 1902. He dropped out of school at the age of 12 to work on a neighboring farm. When he was 13, he moved to Indianapolis to paint horse carriages. At the age of 14, he relocated and worked as a farmhand around Southern Indiana.
In 1906, at age 16, he moved in with his uncle in Albany, Indiana, and worked as a conductor for a streetcar company. He enlisted in the United States Army by the end of that year by lying about his age. He served as a wagoner in Cuba and earned the Cuban Pacification Medal. He was honorably discharged in 1907 and moved with his brother to work for the Southern Railway in Alabama. He continued job-hopping every two or three years until he was 39 and opened his own café.
In 1909, he met his wife, Josephine King. The couple had 3 children together, Margaret, Harland Jr, and Mildred. He moved the family to Jackson Tennessee where he worked at the Illinois Central Railroad during the day and studied law at La Salle Extension University at night. After brawling with a coworker, he lost his job and his family moved in with his in-laws.
After 3 years of working as a lawyer, he was earning enough to support his family again, until his law career ended in a courtroom brawl with his own client. He worked as a life insurance salesman for a few years until the age of 30, when he opened his own ferry boat company on the Ohio River. After the success of that business, he sold it for $22,000 ($412,232 2024 USD) and used the revenue to open an ill-timed acetylene lamp manufacturing company. Delco introduced an electric lamp shortly after.
He job-hopped a few more times until 1930 at the start of the Great Depression and ended up in Nicholasville, Kentucky. At that time, the Shell Oil Company offered him a service station, rent-free, in exchange for a percentage of the gas sales. Out of this service station, he started selling chicken and country ham meals. After a shootout with a competitor, he was commissioned as a Kentucky Colonel by then-governor, Ruby Laffoon.
The Famous Recipe
By 1940, at age 50, Sanders perfected his patented 11 herbs and spices pressure fryer-cooked Fried Chicken Recipe as his clientele grew, and he started franchising. He divorced Josephine in 1947, and he married his mistress Claudia in 1949.
After the success of Salt Lake City’s Kentucky Fried Chicken, restaurant owners started franchising with him and paid $0.04 per chicken. By 1964, there were over 600 Kentucky Fried Chicken franchises throughout North America, the first one was in Salt Lake City, Utah in 1952. Soon after, he closed the original restaurant and worked primarily franchising KFC across America. He would travel to the franchises, and Claudia would mix and ship the secret spice blend to the franchised restaurants.
Cashing In
In 1964, at the age of 74, he started to become overwhelmed with the amount it took to continue the rapid franchising expansion globally. He decided to sign over most of the corporation to a group of investors spearheaded by Jack C. Massey and John Y. Brown Jr for $2 million ($20,309,419,385 2024 USD).
In the sale, he retained control over the franchises in Canada and received a yearly salary of $400,000 ($4,061,883 2024 USD) to be the brand ambassador and travel to make appearances and shoot TV commercials. Near the end of his career, he was highly dissatisfied with the cost-cutting measures that greatly reduced the quality of the food, in his opinion.
By 1971, there were 3,500 franchises and generated $700,000,000 in revenue annually. It was acquired by Heublein Corporation and Colonel Sanders remained on the board and as the official ambassador and company symbol. In 1975 he publicly described the gravy as being “sludge with a wallpaper taste.” The Heublein Corporation sued him for libel. To the Lousiville Courier-Journal, he said, “My God, that gravy is horrible. They buy tap water for 15 to 20 cents a thousand gallons and then they mix it with flour and starch and end up with pure wallpaper paste…There’s no nutrition in it and they ought not to be allowed to sell it… [The crispy fried chicken] recipe is nothing in the world but a damn fried doughball stuck on some chicken.”
See You In Court
Frustrated with how KFC was conducting business, he and Claudia opened a restaurant called, “Claudia Sanders, The Colonel’s Lady,” that had a full-service dinner menu that featured his KFC-style chicken. The pair were planning to expand into a chain. The Heublein Corporation sued him again and the suit was settled out of court.
Colonel Sanders died in 1980 from leukemia at the age of 90. He continued to work until a few months before his death. He was laid in State in the rotunda of the Kentucky State Capitol in Frankfort. More than 500 people attended his funeral. Before his burial at the Cave Hill Cemetery, his body was displayed in an open casket memorial service at the KFC headquarters in Louisville, Kentucky where around 1,200 people attended. He was laid to rest in his signature white suit and black string tie. At the time of his death, there were 6,000 KFC restaurants in 48 countries.
#3 Julia Child
Julia Child.
- Life : (1912–2004)
- Net Worth: $38 Million
Julia Child (born Julia McWilliams) was born in Pasadena, California. She was born into a wealthy family, her father being a real estate investor, and her mother a paper-company heiress. She received pristine schooling at Katherine Branson School for Girls in San Francisco. She was known for being tall, 6’2,” and for being athletic, adventurous, and being a wild prankster. She graduated from Smith College and then moved to New York after Graduation.
She had a full career working at the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) first starting out as a research assistant volunteer. Soon after, joining the intelligence agency, she started being sent on assignments around the world. She was sent to countries such as Sri Lanka, Colombo, China, and Kunming. She married a colleague, Paul Child, whom she worked with in Sri Lanka in 1945 after the pair returned to America after World War II.
To France!
The Childs moved to France in 1948 for Paul’s job, and Julia started cooking. She attended the Cordon Bleu Cooking School, starting at the “housewife,” level and advancing upwards. At one point, she was the only woman in a class of 11 men. She formed relationships with fellow classmates Louisette Bertholle and Simone Beck. The trio dreamed of creating cookbooks to make French cooking accessible.
By the time Julia Childs was 50 in 1962, her first cookbook, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Vol 1 had sold 12,000 copies. It stayed as the top-selling cookbook in the world for 5 consecutive years. She went on to publish several more books and cookbooks. Some of her most famous are Julia’s Delicious Little Dinners (1998), Baking With Julia (1996), In Julia’s Kitchen With Master Chefs (1995), and her posthumously published autobiography My Life in France (2006).
TV Time
She also started appearing on television in 1962. First to promote her cookbook, by preparing an omelet. She began taping her own Television Series, The French Chef, on a salary of $50 ($514 2024 USD) per show on WGBH. It was so successful that it was syndicated to 96 stations. She made subsequent television series and Good Morning America appearances through 1983. On television, she appeared relaxed, playful, confident, and humorous. This uncommon cooking show demeanor made her wildly popular.
A First
Child was the first woman to be inducted into the Culinary Institute Hall of Fame in 1993. She received the Legion d’Honneur, Frace’s highest honor, in 2000. She also had her own exhibit in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History in 2002.
Julia Child was two days away from turning 92 when she passed away from kidney failure in 2004. She never stopped cooking or working. She is celebrated for positively impacting the way that America views cooking and food and making fine dining something that anyone could achieve at home.
#4 Estelle Getty
The Golden Girls.
- Life : (1923–2008)
- Net Worth : $8 Million
Estelle Gettleman (Estelle Getty, Etty) was born on July 25, 1923, in New York. She was Polish American and started her acting career as a child. She grew up in the Lower East Side as one of three children. Her parents were Jewish immigrants from Poland who ran an automobile glass business from the storefront under their apartment. She was inspired to be an actress by attending live vaudeville performances almost every week of her childhood at the Academy of Music.
Acting!
After graduating high school, she worked as a secretary during the day and went to auditions in the evenings. She met and married Arthur Gettleman in 1947, and the couple had two children, Carl and Barry. Up until she was almost 60, she often starred in roles in the New York theater circuit while raising her two sons and also working full-time. She performed in a film, Team Mates (1978), and appeared in one television show, Nurse(1981) before finding her breakthrough role. She made a name for herself when she turned 60 and won the role of Mrs. Beckoff in the Torch Song Trilogy, a Broadway production, in 1982. The playwright, Harvey Feinstein, created the character specifically for her to play.
For her performance, she earned a Drama Desk Award nomination and reprised the role for the next four years. Because of the notoriety she gained from the role, she was cast as Sophia Petrillo on NBC’s sitcom, The Golden Girls when she was 62. Portraying a woman in her late 80s, she used makeup, wigs, and clothing to ager herself to appear to be the oldest member of the cast, when in reality, she was one of the youngest.
Winner
When she was 65 in 1988, she won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series for her role as Sophia Petrillo. She starred in all 177 episodes of the show. The Golden Girls ran for 7 seasons until 1992. She then starred in The Golden Girls spinoff, The Golden Palace, along with fellow actors Betty White and Rue McClanahan.The Golden Palace ran for one season until it was canceled. Following her Golden Girls career, she starred in several television shows and movies. Some of her most popular appearances were in Touched By an Angel (1996), Blossom, The Nanny (1998), Mad About You (1997), and Empty Nest (1988-1995).
Some of the movies she performed in during and after her time at The Golden Girls were Tootsie (1982), Deadly Force(1983), No Man’s Land (1984), Victims for Victims: The Theresa Saldana Story (1984), Mask (1985), Mannequin (1987), Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot (1992), Stuart Little (1999), and The Million Dollar Kid (2000). She also wrote an autobiography, “If I Knew Then, What I Know Now… So What?” and produced an exercise video for senior citizens.
Fighting for Her Beliefs
She was also an activist and ally for the LGBTQ+ Community and was heavily involved in HIV/AIDS activism. When her nephew, Steven Scher contracted the disease, she cared for him until his death in 1992. She lost many other friends in the HIV/AIDS pandemic. She died in 2008 from Lewy Body Dementia. Signs of her dementia started showing up during her filming of The Golden Girls, and during the later seasons, had to rely on cue cards to perform her lines.
#5 Ernestine Shepherd
Body-building.
- Life : (1936–Present)
- Net Worth: $2 Million
Ernestine “Ernie” Shepherd is an American bodybuilder. She is known for being a Guinness Book of World Records holder as the oldest competitive female bodybuilder in the world in 2010 and 2011.
In her childhood, Shepherd was described as being “prissy,” with little interest in athletics. Shepherd worked as a model in her early career and then as a school secretary. At the age of 56 in 1992 she went shopping with her sister Mildred to try on swimsuits. Laughing about how out of shape and sedentary their lifestyles had gotten, they decided to start working out together.
Get Fit
They joined a gym together and started out by attending aerobics classes. Her sister started to lift weights and compete in bodybuilding shows under the stage name Velvet. She suddenly passed away from a brain aneurysm in the early 1990s. Shepherd stepped away from the gym for a few months in deep mourning until loved ones convinced her to continue “what they started together,” and continued her fitness journey. At the age of 71 in 2007, she entered her first body-building competition under the name of “Miss Ernie,” where she took first place in her class at the Natural East Coast Tournament of Champions.
Wow
In 2010 in a show in Italy, she was declared the Oldest Female Bodybuilder in the world at the age of 74. At the time of her win, she was 5’5” and had 9-10% body fat. She re-earned that title in 2011 until she was unseated in 2012 by Edith Connor, who was 77.
Shepherd continues to be extremely active today and continues to compete and run marathons, 5k races, and 10k races. She currently coaches weightlifting clients five days a week and has a rigorous daily routine. She wakes up at 4 AM, runs 10 miles, and then heads to the gym by 8 AM to train with her weightlifting coach, Yohnnie Shambourger, who is a former Mr. Universe winner. Her husband, Collin, cooks her meals of healthy basics such as eggs, chicken, rice, broccoli, cereals, and chestnuts. She lives by the mantra, “Determined- Dedicated- Disciplined To Be Fit.”
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