Nothing but Joy

Austrian millionaire Karl Rabeder unloaded all his worldly possessions to help others – and himself

High in the Austrian Tirol, the air is loud with birdsong, and a middle-aged man is bouncing on the balls of his feet. “It is hard to express,” he says, “this feeling offreedom, of absolute lightness.”

Karl Rabeder expects to feel lighter still, by some several million dollars: The homewares magnate, who has lived in the small, tidy town of Telfs for 13 years, recently made headlines around the world when he announced that he would sell everything he owned to help the poor in Central and Latin America. A stunning farmhouse in the South of France has already gone under the gavel, along with his business, cars (including a $68,000 top-of-the-line Audi), and small fleet of glider planes.

His home – a villa worth more than $2 million just around a river bend from Innsbruck, complete with landscaped lake, sauna, and spectacular mountain views – is his last remaining asset. Soon Rabeder, 48, will hand over the keys of his Tyrolean dream house to the lucky winner of a pan-European lottery and move into a compact wooden hut in the Alps. He can hardly wait. For his money – a personal fortune of close to $5 million – going riches-to-rags is a lot more rewarding than the other way around.

“Wealth,” says Rabeder, a precise, professorial figure in steel spectacles and a plaid shirt, “doesn’t create happiness. For 25 years, I worked like a slave for things I didn’t want or need. Now my dream is to have nothing.”

The serene, all-white home office in which Rabeder tends to his constantly pinging computer is spare by millionaire standards, though the handcrafted furnishings reflect the taste of a connoisseur. He displays no proprietorial pride, however, as he surveys the products of a life’s labour. “Everything, even the chairs we sit on, will go with the house when it is sold,” he explains with evident satisfaction. For his new life in the mountains, he has set aside a change of clothes, two boxes of books, and a laptop. He will live on a monthly stipend of about $1290 and is confident he won’t need half as much.

Growing up in the industrial flatlands of Linz, the young Rabeder believed his purpose in life was to make money. “We were a very poor family. I never met my father. Let’s say he made a decision between his family and alcohol. So my mother and I lived with my grandparents. My grandmother was always good at managing, and she believed that the value of a person is related to his savings. I started working in the family’s small market garden when I was a child. I sold vegetables and found I was good with money. As a teenager, working to finance my degrees in mathematics, physics, and chemistry, I branched out on my own. First I sold flowers from our garden, then I moved to dried flowers, vases, and candles. By the time I was halfway through a second degree, my homewares and interiors business was running so nicely that it didn’t really make sense to do anything else. The money was helpful at first. But I would find myself thinking, Is this what I am here for, to produce things that nobody really needs? And more and more, the answer was no.”

Rabeder describes his growing disaffection with big business and the consumer society: “They tell us to buy stuff for our well-being. But it doesn’t make us happy, so we buy more. It still doesn’t make us happy, and it makes us easy to rule. We are like sheep with a barking dog to the left of us, making us anxious about the global financial crisis and the fact that we could lose our jobs, and another barking dog to the right, warning us about the need for expensive insurance in case we fall ill. So we work for the future without ever being able to live for the day. I know this,” says Rabeder, his voice rising to testimonial pitch, “because for 25 years I lived this life, growing richer and feeling worse.”

His discontent reached a peak in 1998 during a vacation with his then-wife, Irene, in Hawaii. “We had planned the best holiday ever, all the trappings of the five-star lifestyle,” he relates. “Over our three-week stay, it dawned on us that there were no real people there, just actors. The employees were acting the role of being friendly and helpful, while the guests were playing the role of ‘Look, I’m important!’ We came home and went walking here in the mountains. At a hut on the high pasture, a woman brought us two big glasses of Apfelschorle and spilled half of it on our trousers. But to us, it was perfect. We were back in the real world.”

As Rabeder was getting ready to throw over his lavish lifestyle, he was momentarily shocked when his wife left him in 2003. Now Rabeder has nothing but positive things to say. “She met another man,” he says, “and it was the best thing that could have happened to me. I had gotten used to a ‘just OK’ relationship.”

The upheaval helped his mental transition. “Our split taught me to be more mindful of the here and now,” he says. On trips to South America, as coach of Austria’s youth gliding team, he had observed that many people in less developed nations seemed to live more meaningful lives. “Every time I flew back to Frankfurt from El Salvador, I’d look at the faces of the people around me and wonder, Has there been a terrorist attack? Then I’d realise that the anxious expressions were standard in the developed world. In terms of happiness, Europe, Japan, and the United States were actually underdeveloped.

“In the Third World, I met many people with very little in the way of options who were able to live in the moment. I began to realise I didn’t need this house, my house in Provence, nice cars, gliders, or overpriced dinners. The next step was to connect with other people.”

On one trip, Rabeder met a gifted carpenter. “He was an artistic person with ideas for custom-built furniture, and he needed a special kind of saw. Without collateral, the bank would not advance him the money to buy it. So I gave him three hundred dollars. It was an open-ended loan, but the next year, he met me at the airport with a big hug and said, ‘Here’s your money!’ Now he has a business that feeds his children and fulfills him artistically, and it was just so easy!”

This encounter was the fuel for a micro-credit venture that Rabeder would launch. Since 1994, he had funded several philanthropic projects throughout Latin and Central America. One such effort, the School Bakery on the outskirts of Lima, Peru, is going strong. “The bakery not only provides enriched bread to poor kids but also teaches baking skills to the children,” he explains. “That way, they will have a profession.”

Two years ago, Rabeder, along with economist Wolfgang Mauer, founded mymicrocredit.org, a Web-based nonprofit that matches prospective micro-investors with projects in developing countries. Raffling off his house at 99 euros per ticket (about $130) was conceived as a publicity drive for mymicrocredit.org. “If I sold my house through the usual channels, maybe ten people would’ve come to see it and taken an interest in what I’m doing. With 21,999 lots for sale, that’s an awful lot more people in the loop.”

It’s hard to imagine the spreadsheets of a luxury homewares business bringing joy like this. Already his “lose a fortune, gain a life” philosophy has secured a book contract with a major publisher in Germany, and his self-help classes are catching on throughout Europe.

“There is a saying in German: Simple people have happy lives,” Rabeder explains. “It’s not necessarily true, but it does make one thing clear: The more options you have, the more you have to decide what’s important. From a young age, I didn’t ask what was important to me. I merely asked, What is possible for me?” With his life finally on his own terms, he is asked if he believes he’ll change the world. The fledgling guru demurs, “The potential for growth,” he says, striking his heart, “is here.”