When Alex McGaffin died, his estate was worth over $1.2 million, with the vast majority of it held in liquid cash, insurance bonds, and blue-chip shares. In 1995, that amount of capital could have comfortably purchased about eleven average family homes in Melbourne.
In fact, at the time of his death, McGaffin had enough money in his bank accounts to buy the most expensive house that was on the market in Melbourne. Adjusted to modern house-buying power, a metric most Australians are deeply familiar with, McGaffin died with the equivalent of roughly $12 million.
This raises an immediate red flag. How exactly does a divorced father of four, working as a part-time security guard, come into that kind of wealth?
The average annual salary for a working man in Melbourne in 1995 was about $32,000 before tax. McGaffin's estate was the equivalent of nearly fifty years of gross full time income. Yet he had not even been working in a standard, average-paying job for the ten years leading up to his death. The security industry of the late 1980s and early 1990s paid minimum wages, and it did not offer full-time hours.
