Wealth

Lahdi Moutchia's miracle windfall - a $34,757 bank error in her favor - bought her a house in Camden and a car. It must have been fun while it lasted. Moutchia's house in the 1100 block of North 34th Street has been listed for sale, and a Superior Court judge in Camden yesterday ordered that the proceeds from the sale be deposited in an escrow account. The situation that led to her problems began Dec. 7, when she looked at her statement from the Midlantic National Bank/South.

Every sixth grader knows that if you build a better mousetrap, the world will beat a path to your door. Thus it should follow that anyone who wants to get rich ought to concentrate on making better mousetraps. Well, surprise. A recent study by the Federal Reserve Board implies that if you want the world to beat a path to your door nowadays, you should forget about improving the mousetrap and think instead about improving the path. Today's real wealth-building opportunities, according to the Fed, won't be found in productive enterprises like manufacturing, construction, oil refining or farming.

Lorraine Neff got the Big News by phone. She was a 21-year-old schoolteacher then, living in West Philadelphia and earning about $9,000 a year. "Your mother and I think you ought to know," said her father, that he was now giving her a large block of shares in his prosperous manufacturing company - shares that would ultimately be worth several million dollars. "I was totally unaware of my own wealth," she recalled over lunch at a Center City restaurant recently, and shook her head.

When Gerry and Marguerite Lenfest sit still long enough to accept the Philadelphia Award this week, it will be entirely appropriate to fill the air with honorifics and superlatives: The big cash behind the expansion of the Curtis Institute of Music. On track to become the most generous donors in the history of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. But the unseen hands of the Lenfests as civic catalysts have been every bit as deft as the ones signing checks. "He does not give just for the sake of giving.

Aruby Odom-White earns $175,000 a year as a psychiatrist and has reported a net worth of $670,000. Her husband, Ronald A. White, runs a law firm paid millions doing work for the city. She had no experience selling drinks, food or newspapers. And yet Odom-White was deemed a "disadvantaged" businesswoman in order to gain a lucrative share of newsstands and bar/restaurants at Philadelphia International Airport. It was all perfectly legal. The rules governing Philadelphia's program to assist minority contractors say that neither great wealth nor a lack of work experience is a bar to the wealthy getting concessions work at the airport.

What if humanity disappeared tomorrow? According to Alan Weisman, author of The World Without Us, in an interview with Scientific American, nature would reclaim the planet awfully quickly. In the event of an ecumenical rapture or a 12 Monkeys-style plague, Manhattan's suppressed underground rivers would quickly reclaim the Big Apple's core; mosquitoes would thrive; feral cats would rule the roost; and the Statue of Liberty would wait for an enraged Charlton Heston who, like Godot, would never arrive.

WASHINGTON - The wealth gaps between whites and minorities have grown to their widest levels in a quarter-century. The overall gap between rich and poor also widened, according to an analysis of census data. The Pew Research Center's Social & Demographic Trends project looked at U.S. Census data and found that the recession and uneven recovery had erased decades of minority gains, leaving whites on average with 20 times the net worth of blacks and 18 times that of Hispanics. The analysis offers the most direct government evidence yet of the disparity between predominantly younger minorities, whose main asset is their home, and older whites, who are more likely to have 401(k)

In the mid- and late 1800s in Philadelphia, captains of the new Industrial Age were amassing fantastic wealth from railroads, banks, department stores, and real estate development. But the richest of all was rumored to be Henry Clay Gibson, whose fortune was built on the nation's unslakable thirst for rye whiskey. The rise of the magnate who would be the first lord of Maybrook was swift. Gibson's father, John, a Scots-Irish immigrant, constructed a distillery in 1856 on the Monongahela River in Western Pennsylvania; Henry helped run the enterprise and, before long, took the helm.

Emilie K. Asplundh, 95, matriarch of a well-known Philadelphia-area family whose love of the arts provided her with an outlet for her creativity as well as a destination for her philanthropy, died of heart failure Monday at her home in Bryn Athyn. She was the wife of the late Carl H. Asplundh, who with two brothers founded Asplundh Tree Expert Co. in 1928. The Willow Grove firm provides vegetation-management services to utilities and is the largest tree service company in the world.

Mary Curtis is getting ready to give it all away. Five decades of hard work as a doctor, five decades of owning homes that were bought cheap and sold expensive, five decades of saving money so that now the nest egg is measured in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Her two children and two grandchildren already have been showered with gifts. Down payments have been made on houses. Two generations of college tuitions have been footed. Trips have been bankrolled to Australia, Hawaii and Japan.

Are you expecting too much, or too little, out of whatever retirement you'll have? There's no guarantee, of course, but everyone should do some planning and these sites can guide the way. "Oh, no! I forgot to save for retirement," says the headline here. About.com's retirement planning site has links to articles about understanding retirement accounts, how to deal with old 401(k) accounts when you change jobs, and different ways to think about what your financial, housing and other needs will be when and if you retire.

MENLO PARK, Calif. - In Silicon Valley, where sudden wealth is hardly something new and CEOs favor hoodies over bespoke blazers, Facebook's IPO on Friday didn't bring everyday life to a halt. Employees weren't popping champagne corks at company headquarters, at least not where anyone outside could see them. And locals had plenty to do -from finding a job to locating the next Facebook. The company's sprawling headquarters along the southern edge of San Francisco Bay was quiet except for security guards walking the parking lots, a dozen TV satellite trucks and an onslaught of reporters who were not allowed inside.

Last week's financial news included reports of a monster investment loss at JPMorgan and new rules for salvaging failed banks. Here are some sites for tracking banks' health and oversight. Who's in charge? This chart at the Fiscal Times website might simply confirm many folks' worries that bank oversight is so complicated that it makes no sense. Various commissions, departments and bureaus oversee certain activities of banks, while an assortment of agencies, now including the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, try to look after consumer interests.

We all seem to do something wrong when it comes to money. Whether your problem is not saving enough, or investing in money-losers, these sites could help you begin to change. Becoming a saver. There are three basic financial profiles, according to this entry at the personal-finance section on Tipcentral.net. You either spend more than you have, spend what you have, or spend less. Everyone's first long-term goal should be to get into the last category of savers. As creatures of habit, however, it's incredibly hard to do that.

MENTAWAI ISLANDS, Indonesia - Mamat Evendi straps on his primitive breathing device: a garden hose attached to a compressor on the back of his wooden fishing boat. Pulling down his goggles, he splashes into the crystal blue water. A few minutes later he's flashing a thumbs-up, pointing first to a massive, coral-encrusted anchor, then a bronze cannon and finally, peeking up from the sand, the buried deck of a 17th-century European ship. Nearby are pieces of blue-and-white ceramics. A tiny perfume bottle.

Inflation erodes the purchasing power of money over time. Its effects on your life depend on how well your income and investments do keeping up. Take a look at these sites to see how you're doing. Digging the data. InflationData.com is a personal-finance site edited by Tim McMahon. It posts a current inflation rate, based on the government's Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers, of 2.65 percent. The site is rich in articles, charts and links on housing, employment, other economic matters that go into the cost of living, and calculators for doing some figuring on your own. www.inflationdata.com Grim calculation.

The House's passage last week of the Mark Twain Commemorative Coin Act might have provoked scathing mockery from Twain himself that we can only imagine. Beyond his likely bemusement at the tribute, Twain probably would have scorned its enactment by a Congress so broken by partisanship as to be unable to address more serious matters. Twain — who once suggested that coins should read "Within certain judicious limitations, we trust in God" — would have been tickled to see his face engraved on currency.

Car buying, the other great American pastime, is experiencing a resurgence. The work of auto shopping, along with the pesky issue of selling or trading an old car, can be simplified with these sites. Keys to car buying. HowStuffWorks does a good job of prepping car buyers and sellers on the importance of being well-informed on "stuff" like the validity of auto manufacturers' "green car" claims and how not to get snookered in making a deal. Unfortunately, in the world of car trading, very little can be taken at face value.

Web Wealth By Reid Kanaley

Web Wealth By Reid Kanaley