Karl Rabeder was on holiday when it hit him. All this luxury was meaningless. Even worse, his life had become meaningless. He despised the wealth and the wealthy people with whom he had surrounded himself. There was only one thing to do – get rid of it all.
"It was 1998, and my wife and I went to Hawaii for three weeks and spent an enormous amount of money. We said, OK, we're going to have a perfect holiday, only five-star hotels and helicopter flying and whatever. And we really had the feeling there were no real people in this kind of life – it's just actors playing the role of being happy. And I decided I didn't want to be part of this thing."
Rabeder, 48, had dedicated much of his adult life to making money. After university, where he studied mathematics and physics, he became an inventor of fripperies – bottles with candles inside, artificial flowers, that kind of thing. He started a company, and before long he was employing 400 part-time workers. By the age of 32, he was a millionaire.
Rabeder says he was never one of those people who defined himself by his work; it was simply a road to freedom. He lived in Telfs, Austria, and loved the mountains. So he'd work a few months a year, earn far more than he needed, and spend the rest of the time gliding in Europe or South and Central America.
He was never crazy rich – at his wealthiest, he was worth €3.5m (around £3m). But the money did change him. "When I was in this greedy stage, I lost contact with myself, especially, and with people around. I just had contact with this phenomenon called money or lucre or power." He sighs.
How long did this period last? "Twelve years, from 20 to 32." That's a long time, I say. "Yes, much too long."
Rabeder came from a poor background, and his mother had always told him money was a measure of success. But the more he made, the emptier he felt. "I thought, what am I doing here? Is this my only purpose? And, more and more, the answer was no."
Rabeder and his wife, Irene, returned from Hawaii, relieved to find themselves back with true friends. "They just say what they think and mean."
Is that when they decided to give everything away? He pauses. "No, first she left me. That was one of the very good and necessary experiences, because all the time we were best friends, but maybe being best friends is not enough."
Rabeder's story is not an unusual one. Often, the decision to give away money is pre-empted by a life crisis. He and his wife had been together for 17 years and had no children. He insists his decision to give away his money was nothing to do with them splitting up – his wife felt even more stymied by the money – but they both realised they needed a new start. Today, they are apart but still best friends.
It was on a gliding trip in Argentina that Rabeder discovered, to his amazement (and, to an extent, horror), how much a small amount of money could transform people's lives. He met people with nothing, who just needed a few hundred pounds to set up businesses. He began giving out "micro-loans" of €200. "These people had more or less nothing to eat, nowhere to live, and I asked them, 'What would you need to have a better life?' Most said, 'We just need some work.' My next question was, 'What about creating your own work?'"
What astonished him most was that when he returned a year later, they gave him back his money. "This made them really proud – some said, I've bought this machine and I've worked the whole year round and I really like my work." Rabeder is every bit as proud as they are – you can hear the emotion in his voice when he talks about those who had nothing and who are now carpenters and bakers and farmers. "I felt if €200 could make such a difference, what am I doing spending the same amount on one nice meal for two people? I started seeing my money from a different perspective. And that is the life I'm living now."
He sold his six gliders for £350,000 and his £110,000 Audi for £44,000. Now he's giving away his home in Telfs to the winner of a lottery that costs €99 to enter. The villa, which comes complete with lake, sauna and spectacular alpine view, is worth €1.6m, and he is not allowed to raise more than that through the lottery. He will then use the money to support the projects he runs on mymicrocredit.org. He is also flogging an old stone farmhouse with 17 hectares in Provence – that's on the market for £613,000. He plans to move into a wooden hut in the mountains, or a bedsit in Innsbruck.
Rabeder has discovered that giving away money is not as simple or as cheap as he had assumed. He has already spent €400,000 on organising the lottery and paying the necessary taxes.
Does he really want to end up with nothing? "Yes." What is nothing? "Nothing will be one or two backpacks of things that I really need. Clothing. I will put all my books into storage. I've read them already, but some are so important I'd like to return to them later." He cites The Little Prince, by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, and The Power Of Now, by spiritualist Eckhart Tolle.
Rabeder now plans to live off €1,000 a month – money he will earn by lecturing and working as a life coach. He does not consider himself an altruist. After all, he's not earning money to give away – he's tried that, and it made him unhappy. Now he's simply going to earn enough to keep himself going. Is there a religious element to his rejection of all things material? "I would say there is a spiritual thing, not a religious thing."
Even his mother, he says, is happy with his decision to unburden himself. Would he not have been able to improve her standard of life by giving her some cash? "No, she doesn't want any of my money. She's so happy with her life and her cat, and that's all she needs."
He talks about the future – how he wants to exchange ideas, meet like-minded people and get them to give away their money. After all, his money will soon be gone. "I wish to give some kind of braveness to other people, just tell them it's so easy. Get in contact with yourself."
Sara Robin calls it affluenza – simple as that, a disease. And, over the years, she has met many sufferers. They tend to be people who inherited money, as she did, rather than made it themselves.
Robin's inherited wealth was always associated with trauma. When she was two, her mother died, leaving her everything. She went to live with her grandparents – but her grandfather died 11 months later and her grandmother when she was four. To make matters worse, her father remarried a woman who already had a son, and when Robin came into her fortune at 18, her step-brother received nothing. Double trauma. "I remember sitting on my bed thinking, 'This isn't right.'"
Her father worked for the colonial service in Cameroon and Nigeria. She grew up in Africa and Scotland, in the repressed 1950s, and never felt at home anywhere. There was a snobbery and coldness attached to family life that left her miserable. "If you saw a car that was pretty flash but, say, had a nodding dog in the back, they would go on and on about the nodding dog."
Her father bought her a new car when she started university, and this made her feel even more of an outsider. She didn't enjoy having more than others; she simply wanted to be like them. She spent much of her time giving fellow students lifts at university, as if it were a form of penance. She didn't speak about her background, and pretended she had a student grant like the others. "It must have been so obvious to people that I had been to a private school," she cringes. Friends would talk about what they'd do if they came into money, and it made her uneasy.
Robin's inheritance crippled her. Even when she worked, she never felt she was really earning her money, because there was always the trust fund to fall back on. She lost what confidence she had had. "It becomes an illness because you don't have to support yourself, you don't have to decide on a career, and you don't have to worry about whether you can afford to do something, and it can become incredibly disempowering. It's very bad for your self-esteem. You don't feel as if you're succeeding. You feel like a fraud, in fact."
Robin has lived in the same modest terrace house in York for 20 years. She has silver hair, a twinkly smile and is rarely seen without her old yellow bike. As we walk the bike back home, she tells me how she regained a sense of purpose.
After university, she travelled through Australia and the US with her future husband, Hugh. It was now the 70s – she met feminists, Aboriginal land-rights activists, antinuclear protesters, and became politicised. She worked as a bike engineer, was judged by her peers for who she was rather than for her background, and reinvented herself.
By the time she and Hugh returned, she knew that her inheritance was good for one thing only – giving away. They had two children, she helped set up a bike co-op where she worked for many years, and she gave away dribs and drabs of money in a somewhat random fashion.
How much in total? Robin smiles and says she's not good with money. She doesn't know how much she was left and doesn't know how much she has given away. "Oh about £10,000-£20,000 a year. Not that much." She stops. "But back then you could buy a house for £8,000. Would you like some soup?" We're sitting in her kitchen. She lays the table with bread, cheese and a nourishing vegetable broth.
In the early 80s, she met up with another inheritor, owner of the biggest Filofax she had ever seen, which he used for collecting details of people with money who wanted to do something useful with it. They had their first inheritors' meeting a few months later – an extraordinary mix of practical altruism and group therapy. "There were about a dozen of us, and we spent a day sharing stories about our lives and money. None of us had ever had that conversation before, and it was electrifying. There were two women who had brothers who were meant to inherit the family wealth and both had committed suicide because of the pressure to take over the family business. Then there were stupid things like people buying an extra house because they couldn't bear kicking out people they didn't like – all sorts of good and bad stories about money."
One discussion was about the difficulties they'd had turning their backs on their fortunes. "Because you've got to decide whether you want to be secretive about the money and pretend you haven't got it, whether to give it away anonymously – and it can create all sorts of family conflict." If you reject your inheritance, Robin says, your family often think you are rejecting them, and the past, not just their wealth.
Robin helped set up the Network For Social Change, an organisation for wealthy individuals who want to put their money to good use. The organisation comprises both inheritors and those who have made their fortune; the latter tend to have a less troubled relationship with their money, but that doesn't always last. After all, today's self-made millionaires will often go on to parent tomorrow's inheritors.
Unlike Rabeder, Robin does not plan to leave herself with nothing. She wants her two adult children to have enough money to put a deposit on a house. Don't they feel they are entitled to a bit more than that? She smiles, and says it has been difficult at times. When her daughter Shona was 13, she was desperate for a pony. "And I was given a pony when I was 12, though I didn't even ask for one. So how can I then turn round to my daughter and say, 'Sorry, Shona, tough, but because of my political beliefs I'm not going to give you a pony'?" So Shona got her pony. And at the pony club, she started mixing with girls who had money and a very different view of the world.
Yes, Shona did want to know why her parents didn't have a bigger house and bigger car, especially as they could afford it. But Robin says that period didn't last. You can see the relief on her face. "In your early teens, your parents are such a pain, and she was probably furious that I was giving the money away. But now she will completely accept it."
Had she always planned to leave herself with some money? "If you'd asked me 30 years ago, I'd have said by the time I die I'll have given away absolutely everything. But I hadn't had kids then."
Now there are other considerations, she says. "What if I become a basket case and bankrupt my kids because they have to put me in a home? I don't want to be a burden on them. More soup?"
With his green tweed jacket, green pullover and green pocket handkerchief, Brian Burnie looks every inch the country squire. He's 6ft 2in, speaks with a Geordie accent and winks at the end of sentences to show he's not being entirely serious. Burnie is driving me to his home, Doxford Hall, in his silver Fiesta.
Doxford Hall in Northumberland is almost 200 years old, and Burnie has spent £18m rebuilding it into a modern spa hotel with 25 luxury bedrooms. He bought it in 1993, at which time it was derelict. The plan was to develop it into both a family home and hotel, and to give the profits to Marie Curie Cancer Care. Then, six years ago, his wife Shirley was diagnosed with breast cancer. That's when Burnie upped the stakes. He decided he would sell Doxford Hall and use the money to establish a transport system that would make it easier for cancer patients to travel to and from chemotherapy and radiotherapy.
The hotel is set in acres of land, with a magnificent labyrinth at its centre. Blimey, I say, it's like Hampton Court. "Bigger. Largest yew maze in Great Britain. And planted by primary schoolchildren. Ooh, look, there's a red squirrel. Two red squirrels. See them?" He has a gentle voice that sounds constantly surprised.
We walk through the bar ("We've got some lovely whiskies") and the sauna area where he addresses one of his employees ("Hello, Diane, our little favourite"), and into the drawing room where a handful of visitors are chatting and reading.
"Are you the manager?" asks one of the visitors.
"I own Doxford Hall. I'm not a gentleman," Burnie says, somewhat confusingly. One visitor, who finished cancer treatment on New Year's Eve, tells Burnie he has come all the way from Nice to find out more about his scheme.
"You've come all the way from France, have you?" Burnie says with astonishment. "The ambition, before I push up daisies, is to move 50,000 people a year. Oh, we'll do it. And you know what it's going to be called? Daft As A Brush Cancer Care, because you've got to be daft as a brush to do this. So there'll be vehicles all over Northumberland with that sign on."
Burnie describes his background as humble. His father worked on a building site, his mother was a housewife. "My father was a devout socialist. He used to say socialism was Christianity in practice." Is Burnie a socialist? "Yes. But I'm a capitalist. You have to make wealth, and then it's what you do with that."
Burnie, who is 65, failed his 11-plus and went to secondary school. The experience defined him. "I always thought I was a failure. All of my friends went to grammar school. That's why I worked seven days a week." He studied engineering at polytechnic and went to work for a large engineering consultancy. In the late 70s, he and a friend set up a firm of engineers, which he ran for 30 years. Although he made a lot of money, he was never extravagant – he wasn't interested in cars or houses or holidays abroad. He had two preoccupations – work and charity. "My wife enrolled for the National Trust as a one-parent family because I spent most of my life at work." He winks.
Now he says he's done his life's work, and the only thing that matters to him is the charity. "As Baden-Powell was for scouting, so would I love to be for cancer care." Burnie is not averse to comparing himself to great historical figures. "People say to me, 'Why, Brian? Why are you doing all this?' Well, you remember those emotive words of Martin Luther King..."
As we eat in Burnie's restaurant, he runs through the project details – if he transports 50 cancer patients a day, that would work out at 13,000 a year. Eventually, he hopes to have 100 vehicles and move 50,000 people a year. The project will be manned with volunteers, and will work alongside the NHS.
Doxford Hall has cost Burnie £18m. If he hadn't built it, and simply given the money away, he could have achieved a lot more, but the bottom has fallen out of the property market and he thinks he'll end up selling it for much less money than he invested in it. He doesn't want to give exact figures, but when he pays his bills and leaves something for himself and Shirley, he will have £3m to give to Daft As A Brush.
Burnie says he's not interested in leaving himself money to spare. "You are what you are, and if you've been brought up with nothing, relatively speaking, it's nice to continue that way of life. I've met people from the Isle of Man who have moved there not to pay tax and they really are challenging people to have in your company."
He says his three children are not interested in inheriting his wealth, either, which is lucky because he wouldn't have left it for them either way. "As a parent, the best thing you can give your children is time. It's not about money."
But Shirley, who is now in remission, thinks rather differently. It's not that Shirley isn't passionate about giving, he says, she's just not quite as passionate as he is. Is she a socialist? "No." Has that created conflict? "A little bit."
How much money will he leave them with? "Could you just say I'm giving away most of my pennies? I have a pension – private pension of about £20k a year." That's more than enough, he says. But yes, of course, there is the small matter of finding Shirley a home she's happy with.
Have they started looking? He looks sheepish. "No." But the deadline for selling up is getting closer and closer? "Yes, yes, and I'm ducking and diving." She must be going crazy? "Aye, she is." He laughs nervously. "What I've said to her is, we can't do anything until we definitely know we have a sale. I think we'll move into rented accommodation initially."
A few weeks later, I get a call from an ecstatic Brian Burnie. He can't get his good news out fast enough. He's just sold up, the contract's been signed. And has he found somewhere nice for himself and Shirley? Silence. "Erm, no. It's causing a few colourful discussions between us. But we're splitting the remains of the money so she's going to come into a few pennies. She's going to buy a house, but I'm not interested in bricks and mortar these days. I just want to move 50,000 patients a year." That's all very well, I say, but I'm worried about you and Shirley – you're not going to split up over this, are you? "Oh, no, life's too short." But where will you live? "Pass."
Let's not focus on the negatives, he says. Like Karl Rabeder and Sara Robin, Burnie already feels liberated and is looking forward to doing some good with the wealth that proved such a burden. "When we've moved that 50,000th patient, I'll go, 'Yabba-Dabba-Doo!' and I'll blame Martin Luther King for having a dream."