Childhood Capital as Compounding Origin

“I started investing in stocks myself when I was in the third grade of elementary school. One day, my father placed a stack of 1 million yen bound with a band and said, "Shosei, you always ask for allowance, but I can give you 1 million yen now. However, this will be your allowance until you graduate from university. What will you do?"”

“My parents gifted me 110,000 yen every year until I entered university, and continued to buy stocks in my name. The reason for the 110,000 yen was that, at that time, gifts up to 100,000 yen were tax-exempt. With 110,000 yen, a 1,000 yen gift tax was required, leaving a tax record. This made it easier to prove it was my property in the future. The total amount of the gifts was about 2 to 3 million yen, but the value of the stocks they bought for me, which included companies like Mitsui Real Estate and Kintetsu, was about 20 million yen, I recall. Copies of these fractional stocks still exist, along with proofs of the tax paid on the annual gifts.”