I recently watched Interview with the Vampire – the TV Show based on Anne Rice’s novels – and absolutely loved it. 

While the storytelling was great, one detail stood out to me –the vampires are loaded. 

Louis de Pointe du Lac, a relatively youthful vampire at 145 years old, is in a relationship with Armand, who is 514. In the modern-day storyline they live in obscene luxury in Dubai.

Naturally this got me thinking, not about blood, immortality or the burden of eternal life, but about compound interest. 

Any halfway intelligent vampire should be filthy rich. 

This is not because vampires are necessarily financial geniuses. They could be pretty average investors and still end up absurdly wealthy, provided they obey one simple rule – don’t die.

That, admittedly, is where vampires have an advantage over the rest of us. 

The average mortal investor has a painfully short investment window.

You spend the first couple of decades being educated, the next few building a career, raising kids, paying off a mortgage, upgrading the car, replacing the dishwasher. Just when your wealth starts to compound significantly, you retire and must draw the money down again. 

A vampire never reaches that point. A vampire doesn’t need a retirement plan. A vampire’s spreadsheet runs for 400-plus years. 

Even a boring portfolio becomes exciting when the time horizon is long enough.

Buy land in a growing city. Hold shares in productive businesses. Reinvest income. Avoid catastrophic mistakes. Keep your identity somewhat plausible. Hire a creative accountant. Repeat for a century. Eventually you are not merely wealthy, you are old-money wealthy. 

This is where vampires differ from zombies. Zombies are terrible investors. They lack impulse control and strategic foresight.

Vampires, at least in most myths, operate under some kind of code. They do not turn everyone into vampires. They remain rare. They are secretive, selective and, crucially, patient. A vampire understands scarcity. 

Scarce beings invest in scarce assets. Land, heritage buildings, art, water rights, prime commercial property, equity in companies that quietly clip the ticket from everyone else’s consumption. The kind of assets that become more valuable as populations grow, cities densify and economies become more complex. 

If you bought a patch of land in inner Melbourne, Sydney or Brisbane two centuries ago and simply managed not to sell it, your descendants would think of you as a genius.

In truth, your genius might have consisted mostly of being stubborn, boring and long dead. 

That is the vampire model of wealth creation. Buy rare things, hold them for a very long time. Let population growth, productivity growth, inflation and human ambition do the heavy lifting for you. 

Of course, a vampire has practical problems. Investing in your........

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