"Wealth without the wisdom that built it is light without its star." — Steve Martin Compound interest gets all the attention in financial planning, and it deserves it; it's one of the few genuinely miraculous things about money. But there's a second kind of compounding I think about just as often, and it doesn't show up on any statement: the slow compounding of values, passed down, uninvested for decades, and then suddenly mature. My mother recited a poem to me at bedtime for