Helena works remotely as a marketing director. This week, she's traveling—part of her new goal to stress less and enjoy her money. If you want to be on What We Spend, we'd love to hear from you: write us at [email protected] To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Who is Helena and what is her financial background?
like on the trust because it was in my grandmother's name who's still alive, but essentially they'd spent all of the money and she didn't know.
Oh God. First of all, you said it was a substantial inheritance. What does that mean? I think it was like $20 million. Helena's parents are from Iraq, and Helena's grandpa on her mom's side was on the board of a big oil company there. It was a great job, but Helena's grandpa was afraid of political instability in his country.
In 1963, right after my mom was born, He was like, we need to leave Iraq. And he moved my family from Iraq to England in 1963. And he basically left everything behind. I think he brought like a few briefcases full of cash.
Helena says once he got to England, her grandpa started over. He took the cash he brought and bought an apartment that he started renting out in London. Then he reinvested the money he made from that property into more property until he was running a few bed and breakfasts.
And then he ended up becoming pretty decently successful off of that and then started getting like bigger commercial property management and property investment offers from just like friends of friends who had heard about him basically. So he helped open like the Houston Galleria, which is like the Mega Mill in the U.S. He started getting contracts in like the Middle East and
Korea and Japan to build commercial places like malls in Saudi Arabia and Japan and Korea as well. And so that's sort of when it started booming.
Over time, he became more and more successful. Years later, when he passed away from a heart attack, he left the money he'd made throughout his life to his wife.
Again, whole Iraq story. Like she was much younger than him. She never even finished high school. So she didn't want to be the person like managing the money or the investment. So she put in the hands of someone else. I'll keep anonymous, but they ended up spending all of it, which I just can't even process how you could spend all that money. But it happened.
I mean, literally, how did they spend all that money? Do you know?
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