Karl Rabeder

Millionaire gives away fortune which made him miserable
Austrian millionaire Karl Rabeder is giving away every penny of his £3 million fortune after realising his riches were making him unhappy.

By Henry Samuel in Paris
Published: 8:16PM GMT 08 Feb 2010

Mr Rabeder, 47, a businessman from Telfs is in the process of selling his luxury 3,455 sq ft villa with lake, sauna and spectacular mountain views over the Alps, valued at £1.4 million.

Also for sale is his beautiful old stone farmhouse in Provence with its 17 hectares overlooking the arrière-pays, on the market for £613,000. Already gone is his collection of six gliders valued at £350,000, and a luxury Audi A8, worth around £44,000.

Mr Rabeder has also sold the interior furnishings and accessories business – from vases to artificial flowers – that made his fortune.

"My idea is to have nothing left. Absolutely nothing," he told The Daily Telegraph. "Money is counterproductive – it prevents happiness to come."

Instead, he will move out of his luxury Alpine retreat into a small wooden hut in the mountains or a simple bedsit in Innsbruck.

His entire proceeds are going to charities he set up in Central and Latin America, but he will not even take a salary from these.

"For a long time I believed that more wealth and luxury automatically meant more happiness," he said. "I come from a very poor family where the rules were to work more to achieve more material things, and I applied this for many years," said Mr Rabeder.

But over time, he had another, conflicting feeling.

"More and more I heard the words: 'Stop what you are doing now – all this luxury and consumerism – and start your real life'," he said. "I had the feeling I was working as a slave for things that I did not wish for or need.

I have the feeling that there are lot of people doing the same thing."

However, for many years he said he was simply not "brave" enough to give up all the trappings of his comfortable existence.

The tipping point came while he was on a three-week holiday with his wife to islands of Hawaii.

"It was the biggest shock in my life, when I realised how horrible, soulless and without feeling the five star lifestyle is," he said. "In those three weeks, we spent all the money you could possibly spend. But in all that time, we had the feeling we hadn't met a single real person – that we were all just actors. The staff played the role of being friendly and the guests played the role of being important and nobody was real."

He had similar feelings of guilt while on gliding trips in South America and Africa. "I increasingly got the sensation that there is a connection between our wealth and their poverty," he said.

Suddenly, he realised that "if I don't do it now I won't do it for the rest of my life".

Mr Rabeder decided to raffle his Alpine home, selling 21,999 lottery tickets priced at just £87 each. The Provence house in the village of Cruis is on sale at the local estate agent.

All the money will go into his microcredit charity, which offers small loans to Latin America and builds development aid strategies to self-employed people in El Salvador, Honduras, Bolivia, Peru, Argentina and Chile.

Since selling his belongings, Mr Rabeder said he felt "free, the opposite of heavy".

But he said he did not judge those who chose to keep their wealth. "I do not have the right to give any other person advice. I was just listening to the voice of my heart and soul."

The Hangover 2: Electric Boogaloo

So I got off at work yesterday at 3:30 instead of the usual 4:30, so I offered to buy Adrian a drink before heading home. We sat down, ordered our drinks, and were just hanging out. I remember ordering a second beer. And then I woke up in a hospital, wearing my jeans with a gown and with an IV. I found a bag with my clothes in, and searched for my phone. It wasn't there, but I had Adrian's phone, which told me it was just past 11:00. I passed out again, and vaguely remember trying to remove the gown while they were taking the IV out. A woman came and asked me questions that I had no answer for. After a couple of minutes, she asked if I'd seen the movie The Hangover. "Yeah," I replied, "I was just thinking, this is a lot like that. Except... not really funny."

I couldn't call Jenny without my phone, and they offered to get me a taxi. I asked if I would be charged for it, and then it occurred to me to ask... "Where am I?" I was in Bellevue. I was really confused--I knew Adrian would have looked after me, and I knew Josh (the bartender) would have looked after him. So how had I wound up in a hospital in another town, with six hours missing?

I went outside for a moment to wait for the cab, but got chilled--my bag-o-clothes had not contained my flannel shirt--so I went inside the lobby to wait. Something on the wall got my attention... I think it was some art piece made of broken glass. I looked down from there, and there was my flannel shirt on the floor. Had I dropped it there earlier, looking at the same art piece? So many questions should have come to mind to ask (how did I get here? where was I found? where was Adrian? what the hell did Josh give us?), but they didn't.

With Lou Reed's "Perfect Day" stuck in my head, I slept in the cab on the way home (how did he know where I live?) and Jenny and Lisha were waiting worriedly when I walked in. I brushed my teeth and we went to bed, and I fell asleep knowing that I could call Adrian at work in the morning and everything would come to make sense.

I woke up around five, still drunk (what the hell did Josh give us?). With the bedroom spinning and tilting, I decided to lay in the bathroom for a bit. (I started to read The Return of the Sorceror by Ashton Clark--it's very, very good.) I woke up at seven and called out from work. At eleven I drove Jenny to work so she didn't have to worry about parking. No longer drunk, I just felt like hell--panicked, extremely freaked out, and sore all over. I stopped by the mall, where I looked for a cheap game to play as I spent the day on the couch. I got home and called B&N and asked for Adrian.

"Hey man, I just wanted to make sure you made it to work all right."
"Yeah, I'm here, but I'm leaving. I can't work. I'm... I'm freaking out. So you looked out for me last night?"
"...What?"
"I woke up in the hospital, man!"
"Me too! I don't even remember leaving Cucina Cucina."
"Me either, man! But apparrently we came back to work. I got my stuff out of my locker. We must have passed out in the street, then. They told me they picked me up on 12th. Josh must have served us poison. I've got your book, but I lost my phone."
"I've got your phone--I'm talking to you on your phone, because I lost my phone! I woke up in the hospital and it was in my pocket."
"Well I'm going to go home. I'm going to come in tomorrow and finish today's shipment. I'm just really freaking out."

So other than the fact that we were picked up on 12th Street, and that I very probably embarrassed myself at work, I still have no idea what happened last night.

[2/7/2010 16:23 update]
---At work, Nicki told me we came through, probably about 19:00 (best guess) and seemed tipsy, but fine. Said we were in & out in just a couple of minutes.
---At the restaurant, Josh said we seemed fine when we left. Nobody was with us, and we hadn't talked with anybody but him while we were there. He recalled we'd had two large beers each, and he'd served us three shots of whiskey, one of them 100 proof.
---According to the hospital, my blood/alcohol content was 0.221. There was no evidence of drugs. I was brought in by ambulance at approximately 19:30.