Austrian millionaire gives away his 3 million pounds fortune to 'buy' happiness!

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Karl Rabeder, a businessman from Telfs, who owns an empire worth 3 million pounds, has put up for sale his luxury 3,455 sq ft villa with lake and sauna over the Alps, valued at 1.4 million pounds.

Also he is selling an old stone farmhouse in Provence with its 17 hectares overlooking the arrière-pays, on the market for 613,000 pounds.

He has already got rid of six gliders valued at 350,000,pounds and a luxury Audi A8, worth around 44,000 pounds.

"My idea is to have nothing left. Absolutely nothing. Money is counterproductive - it prevents happiness to come," the Telegraph quoted Rabeder as saying.

He added: "For a long time I believed that more wealth and luxury automatically meant more happiness.

"I come from a very poor family where the rules were to work more to achieve more material things, and I applied this for many years.

"More and more I heard the words: ''Stop what you are doing now - all this luxury and consumerism - and start your real life''. I had the feeling I was working as a slave for things that I did not wish for or need."

Rabeder thoughts raced even more when he was on a three-week holiday with his wife to islands of Hawaii.

He said: "It was the biggest shock in my life, when I realised how horrible, soulless and without feeling the five star lifestyle is.

"In those three weeks, we spent all the money you could possibly spend. But in all that time, we had the feeling we hadn''t met a single real person - that we were all just actors. The staff played the role of being friendly and the guests played the role of being important and nobody was real."

Also, he mentioned that gliding trips in South America and Africa only made him sadder.

He said: "I increasingly got the sensation that there is a connection between our wealth and their poverty."

Suddenly, Rabeder thought that "if I don''t do it now I won''t do it for the rest of my life".

Now, all the money he has will be forwarded to his microcredit charity, which offers small loans to Latin America and builds development aid strategies to self-employed people in El Salvador, Honduras, Bolivia, Peru, Argentina and Chile.

Rabeder said he felt "free, the opposite of heavy".

He ended: "I do not have the right to give any other person advice. I was just listening to the voice of my heart and soul."

--ANI