The Oracle of Omaha, Warren Buffett, is famed for his investment prowess. So it’s perhaps no surprise that when he learned his family members were blowing the thousands of dollars he gifted them each year, he changed tack and began buying them shares instead.
Come the most wonderful time of the year, members of the Buffett family previously looked forward to receiving $10,000 in hundred-dollar bills. Buffett’s former daughter-in-law, Mary Buffett—who was married to the Berkshire Hathaway CEO’s son Peter—said as soon as the guests returned home after Christmas Day, they would splash the cash.
Mary told ThinkAdvisor in 2019: “As soon as we got home, we’d spend it, whoo!”
This likely displeased the man worth $154 billion, whose financial ethos revolves around playing the long game and sensible spending. Mary added: “Then, one Christmas there was an envelope with a letter from him. Instead of cash, he’d given us $10,000 worth of shares in a company he’d recently bought, a trust Coca-Cola had. He said to either cash them in or keep them.”
Perhaps taking inspiration from her father-in-law at last, Mary decided to hold onto the shares: “I thought ‘Well, [this stock] is worth more than $10,000.’ So I kept it, and it kept going up.”
Every year after that, Buffett would continue to gift his family members stocks, which included Wells Fargo one year. It’s a good pick: Even in 2025, Wells Fargo is up 21.9% and is up more than 200% over the past five years.
Mary began to follow Buffett’s lead, saying that if he bought the shares, she would then go and “buy more of it, because I knew it was going to go up.”
Buffett’s family also faced quite a conundrum come December each year: How do you reciprocate a gift worth $10,000 or more? This is made all the more complicated by the question of what to buy a billionaire.
Mary decided the best gift she could give the now 95-year-old was to demonstrate that his children and their families were successful in their own right. “The first year we were married, I realized, ‘Warren is very rich. Therefore, he doesn’t want anything,’” Mary recalled, and instead shared with him the balance sheet for the music company she ran. “I just wanted to show him, ‘Look, we’re doing good,’” she added.
It’s giving season
With December upon us, families around the world will be gearing up to spend a significant amount on their loved ones. And like Buffett in the early years, now is the time of year when many will be gifting lump sums of cash to their families.
According to U.K. insurance giant SunLife, more than one in five people over the age of 50 has given a significant amount of money as a present in the past five years. Of those people, 33% of them timed it with Christmas or a special birthday.
The biggest form of cash gifts was for house down payments, and they were significant sums as a result. SunLife, which surveyed more than 2,000 people, found people over age 50 gifted, on average, £30,634 ($40,568). The next largest gifts were for help with home renovations, with an average of £8,932 ($11,828).
Younger generations are likely to get more used to receiving cash gifts from their older relatives in the decades to come, courtesy of the Great Wealth Transfer. The inheritance wave is worth some $83 trillion according to UBS, and will take place over the next 20 to 25 years.
Reports have previously suggested that a $9 trillion “sideways” wealth transfer from husbands to their wives has resulted in an uptick in investment—straight out of the Buffett playbook. It remains to be seen whether younger generations will follow suit.