Larry Fink's parents ran a shoe store and taught English. After they died, the size of their nest egg surprised him

Back in March, markets were roiled after U.S. strikes on Iran sent oil prices skyrocketing. At the same time, inflation was rising, so too was the uncertainty about the AI boom. But Fink had a message to Americans: invest, and do it for the long-term.

His message draws on personal experience — looking back at his parents’ financial habits — and argues patience is your best tool when it comes to market performance.

‘An enthusiastic investor’

In this year’s annual chairman’s letter to investors, Fink branded himself a “long-term optimist” when it comes to capital markets.

He used the example of his own family to drive home his point. He writes that his parents didn’t come from wealthy families, but they were consistent when it came to investing.

“My father was born in 1925. My mother in 1930. They didn’t come from a lot of money. My dad owned a shoe store. My mom taught English. But they saved what they could and invested it.”

It’s not the first time that Fink has invoked his parents’ story in his annual letter.

In 2024, he revealed that when his mother passed away in 2012, and his father began to decline soon after, he and his brother had to manage their parents’ estate.

When they looked at the books, they found a much more substantial nest egg than they were expecting. “Both my mom and dad worked great jobs for 50 years, but they were never in the top tax bracket,” Fink wrote.

He doesn’t know exactly how much they made together. But in today’s dollars, he estimates it was probably not more than $150,000.

“So, my brother and I were surprised when we saw the size of our parents’ retirement savings. It was an order of magnitude bigger than you’d expect for a couple making their income. And when we finished going over their estate, we learned why: My parents’ investments.”

Fink notes that his father “had always been an enthusiastic investor.” And it was his father that got him into the world of finance to begin with: “He encouraged me to buy my first stock (the DuPont chemical company) as a teenager.”

Fink said that investing for retirement is all about a long-term mindset — and shared his father’s own logic behind the strategy: “My dad invested because he knew that whatever money he put in the bond or stock markets would likely grow faster than in the bank. And he was right.”

The long game

Fink’s beliefs, and his father’s investing success, rely on the historical average returns of the S&P 500.

“If my parents had $1,000 to invest in 1960, and they put that money in the S&P 500, then by the time they’d reached retirement age in 1990, the $1,000 would be worth nearly $20,000. That’s more than double what they would have earned if they’d just put the money in a bank account,” Fink wrote.

Since the S&P 500’s launch in 1957, the average annual return has been about 10%, according to Fidelity. In the 40 years ending December 2025, that average is 11.5%. Of late it’s been delivering even greater returns — the five-year average return from January 2021 to December 2025 was 14.4%.

In Fink’s 2026 letter, he highlights that “over time, staying invested has mattered far more than getting the timing right.”

“Over the past two decades, every dollar invested in the S&P 500 grew more than eightfold. Miss just the ten best days, and you would have earned less than half. And some of the