The man who gave his name to the Roth IRA was William V. Roth Jr., an American lawyer and politician from Wilmington, Delaware. Mr. Roth, a Republican, represented Delaware for 30 years in the Senate and 4 in the House of Representatives.

Roth was known as a fiscal conservative. He was a long time member of the U.S. Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs and the U.S. Senate Committee on Finance. He is best remembered as a strong advocate of tax cuts, and he co-authored the Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981 with Jack Kemp. Roth was also the legislative sponsor of the individual retirement account plan that bears his name, the Roth IRA.

He was an aggressive watchdog against wasteful government spending. In 1985, as chairman of the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee, he disclosed that the Navy was buying toilet seats for one of its aircraft models for $640 each. The seller, the Lockheed-California Company, said the seat was designed to be “lightweight, corrosive resistant, thermo-formed, polycarbonate material, seamless and sufficiently durable to withstand repeated usage and aircraft landings.” But, Mr. Roth said, “You can go into a mobile home and see something not much different.”

Roth co-authored the book The Power to Destroy in which he gave a behind-the-scenes account of how the IRS became a law unto itself and how it had destroyed the lives of many ordinary Americans. The horror stories from taxpayers and agency employees that Roth’s investigation uncovered elicited a public outcry that demanded immediate action, from Capitol Hill to the White House, and Roth details how these stories translated into specific initiatives that served as the foundation for the actual restructuring legislation.

The Power to Destroy Price: $23.00 You Pay: $3.39 (85% savings!)

Roth graduated from the University of Oregon in 1943, Harvard Business School in 1947, and Harvard Law School in 1949. During World War II he served in a United States Army intelligence unit from 1943 until 1946. After being admitted to the California Bar in 1950, he moved permanently to Delaware in 1954, and began his work as an attorney for the Hercules Corporation. His political career began in 1966 when he was elected to the United State House of Representatives.

Mr. Roth was known for campaigning around Delaware with a St. Bernard. ‘”You stand out there with a St. Bernard, and the kids come over; they want to pet the dog,” he said. “It gives you an opportunity to talk to the parents.” He had one for every campaign. At the time of his death, Mr. Roth had a St. Bernard named Wilhelm IV.

Roth died December 13, 2003 in Washington, DC. It was recently announced that the Chesapeake & Delaware Canal Bridge carrying Delaware Route 1 will be named for Roth.

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Warren Buffet also known as “The Oracle of Omaha,” with a net worth of around $36 billion, ranks as the second third richest man in the world, just behind his friend and bridge partner Bill Gates. He came from a small town, leads a relatively simple life, and never forgot his roots, not only that he is also a great philanthropist.

Arguably the greatest investor of all time, Buffet is chairman of Berkshire Hathaway. With his uncanny ability to detect undervalued companies and purchase them on the cheap, over his five-decade career, Buffet has gone on to make many people very financially comfortable. Yet his annual salary as Berkshire Hathaway’s chairman and CEO is only $100,000.

At the age of 77, he has the appearance of a white-haired, congenial grandfather figure, and he still lives on Farnam Street in Omaha, in the same gray stucco house he bought almost forty years ago for $31,500. His staple diet consists of steak or burgers with his favorite drink- Coca-Cola — a company he’s invested in since 1988.

If Buffet’s lifestyle seems a little down to earth and even quaint, then so may seem his investment strategy. Not one to listen to the babble and hum of rumor or to follow the whim of macroeconomic trends and Wall Street fads, Buffet’s eagle eye picks out undervalued companies with low overhead costs, high growth potential, strong market share and low price-to-earning ratios, this is because he knows that eventually the rest of the world will catch on.

Warren Edward Veirdo Buffet was born on August 30, 1930, in Omaha Nebraska, the only son of three children, to Leila and Howard Buffet. His father was a stock broker who also became a member of congress. The young Buffet showed his first steps towards the entrepreneurial spirit when he made his first stock market investment at age eleven.

Buffet graduated from the University of Nebraska then went to Columbia University to do a Masters degree in Economics. It is there that he met the influential investor Benjamin Graham. It was while working in Graham’s company “Graham-Newman”, that Buffet honed his now legendary investing skills.

After Graham’s retirement, Buffet returned to Omaha and started a limited investment fund partnership with the aid of a small group of family and friends. Over a period of ten years “Buffet Partnership Ltd.” accrued substantial returns for its investors, after which time Buffet liquidated the fund and took control of textile company Berkshire Hathaway.

This was a troubled time for the textile company and Buffet was well aware of this. Using his innate ability for investing wisely, he wound down the textile company and shifted the portfolio of investments to carefully selected companies over a period of years to include Coca-Cola, American Express, Gillette and The Washington Post. Berkshire Hathaway still owns major holdings in each of these major brand companies.

Admirably, Buffet is also a great philanthropist. In 2006 he made the decision to donate around $37 billion of his shares of the Berkshire Hathaway Foundation to five charitable foundations, the largest of which will be the Bill and Melina Gates Foundation.

Corinna Underwood is a writer from Debt Management Talk, a forum where you can discuss anything on personal finance.

He lives in Mexico, a country where more than half the population struggles in poverty. Slim controlled companies currently account for nearly half of the entire Mexican stock exchange’s value.

Slim’s ascent up the world wealth league has been very rapid. Here’s a look at who he is and how he did it.

Slim was born in Mexico City on January 28, 1940 and has credited his father, a Lebanese immigrant who settled in Mexico in 1902 — for laying the foundations of his immense wealth. Slim’s father opened a retail store in 1911 and young Carlos helped out behind the counter. The store proved a big success and his father used the profits to invest in property.

Slim’s father trained him to keep crystal clear accounts of his pocket money income and expenditure. Errors and omissions meant deductions.

That early training paid off and Slim began his own business career on the playground, trading baseball cards. By age 12, he had moved on to trading stocks and bonds. And at the age of 26, Slim ventured into the business world with a construction engineer diploma and $400,000 he had inherited from his parents.

Slim followed in his father’s business footsteps. In the 1980s, when Mexico was reeling from a debt crisis and investors were pulling out, Carlos was buying companies — with the money inherited from his parents — and turning them around into efficient profit making enterprises. “They were cheap”, he said, explaining his business strategy.

But Slim did not really stand out from Mexico’s business elite until 1990, when he snatched a controlling stake in the national fixed line telephone network — Telmex. The company owns about 90 percent of Mexico’s phone lines, and since then, the market value of Telmex stock has rocketed from $7.39 billion to over $41 billion.

It was the most recent increase in the value of Telmex’s shares that helped push Slim’s wealth over that of Microsoft founder Bill Gates who is worth about 59.2 billion dollars.

Most of Slim’s profits come from his Mexican telecommunications industry gathering which also includes Telcel, which covers 80 percent of mobile telephony, and America Movil, which has more than 100 million clients across Latin America.

But, Slim owns more than just phone services. Even if Mexicans never pick up a Slim phone, make a Slim connection to the internet or chat on a Slim mobile, they are probably still customers of Carlos. They shop in his department stores and convenience shops, buy CDs from his music outlets, eat in his restaurants and smoke his cigarettes.

Many of the country’s ATMs are provided by Slim’s bank Inbursa. There is also a Slim infrastructure company which is busy building roads, water treatment plants and offshore oil platforms.

As Slim’s wealth has grown, so has the criticism. Business groups regularly complain about Telmex’s business phone rates, which are more than twice as high as in the United States. President Felipe Calderón, who took office last December, is under pressure to show that he won’t buckle in the face of Mexico’s powerful monopolies and has been trying to beef up regulation of Mexico’s telecommunications industry.

Perhaps as a response to the increased criticism and new scrutiny as the world’s richest man, Slim has announced that he will increase his private foundation’s endowment from $4 billion to $10 billion by 2011, promising “there would be no ceiling on his donations”.

In past interviews, Mr. Helu has doubted the usefulness of charity, arguing that private enterprise, which creates jobs, does more for the poor than philanthropy. Although he is under pressure that he should participate more in humanitarian actions, Slim has dedicated himself to starting new jobs in Latin America because he believes that is the right thing to do.

John Davison Rockefeller, Sr. was an American industrialist and philanthropist. Rockefeller believed since he was a child that his purpose in life was to make as much money as possible, and then use it wisely to improve the lot of mankind.

In 1870, Rockefeller founded the Standard Oil Company and by 1872 Standard Oil had purchased and thus controlled nearly all the refining firms in Cleveland, plus two refineries in the New York City area.

One of the business problems that Rockefeller encountered was the high cost of transporting his oil to his Cleveland refineries (40 cents a barrel) and the refined oil to New York ($2 a barrel). Rockefeller negotiated an exclusive deal with the railway company where he guaranteed sixty car-loads a day. In return the transport prices were reduced to 35 cents and $1.30. The cost of his oil was reduced and his sales increased dramatically.

Rockefeller now turned his attentions to controlling the oil industry throughout the United States. His competitors were given the choice of being swallowed up by Standard Oil or being crushed. By 1890 Rockefeller’s business had swollen into an immense monopoly which could fix its own prices and terms of business because it had no competitors. It is estimated that Standard Oil owned three-fourths of the petroleum business in the U.S. in the 1890s.

President Theodore Roosevelt, who had been elected on a program that included reducing the power of large corporations, attempted to use the Sherman Anti-Trust Act to deal with Rockefeller’s monopoly of the oil industry. This was largely ineffective and it was not until 1911 that the Supreme Court dissolved the Standard Oil monopoly.

Rockefeller was 57 years old in 1896 when he decided that others should take over the day-to-day leadership of Standard Oil. He kept his stock and as gasoline grew in importance, his wealth soared and he became the world’s richest man and first billionaire. His wealth in today’s terms would be well over $200 billion.

As ruthless as he was at making his money, he was just as generous giving it away. He began to focus his efforts on philanthropy, giving away the bulk of his fortune in ways designed to do the most good as determined by careful study, experience and the help of expert advisers.

He used his fortune to create the modern systematic approach of targeted philanthropy with foundations that had a major impact on medicine, education, and scientific research. His foundations pioneered the development of medical research, and was instrumental in the eradication of hookworm and yellow fever.

His philanthropy grew out of his early family training, religious convictions, and financial habits. “I believe it is every man’s religious duty to get all he can honestly and to give all he can,” he once wrote. In 1913 Rockefeller established the Rockefeller Foundation (RF) to “promote the well-being of mankind throughout the world.” He transferred $235,000,000 to it by 1929.

Oddly enough, Rockefeller was probably best known in his later life for the practice of giving a dime to children wherever he went.

When Rockefeller died, on May 23, 1937, his estate totaled only $26,410,837. He had given away most of his property to his philanthropies and to his son and other heirs. But, because his reputation was so sullied he had never received the credit that he was due for his great acts on behalf of humankind.

If you like business, politics and wealth, then do yourself a favor and get his biography, Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr.