Mitt Romney says he didn't inherit money from his parents

Multimillionaire GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney says he built that wealth himself, "the American way."

Romney, the son of a corporate CEO, made his own fortune leading private equity firm Bain Capital.

But as the product of a wealthy Michigan suburb, private prep school and ultimately Harvard, Romney still faces accusations of silver-spoon privilege.

"I know the Democrats want to go after the fact that I've been successful," Romney said at a Republican presidential debate in Charleston, S.C. on Jan. 19, 2012, as he explained why he would wait to release his tax returns. "I'm not going to apologize for being successful."

His father, George Romney, who led Detroit automaker American Motors Corp., was a three-time governor of Michigan and himself ran for president in the 1960s.

"I could have stayed in Detroit like him and gotten pulled up in a car company," Romney said at the debate. "I went off on my own. I didn't inherit money from my parents. What I have, I earned. I worked hard, the American way."

We were curious. Did Romney, the last of George and Lenore's four children, receive no inheritance on his path to wealth?

Romney's words

We asked Romney's campaign about his claim.

According to a short history of the George W. Romney Institute of Public Management at BYU, the family provided an endowment in 1998, within a few years of George Romney's death.

So, in Romney's own words, he did "inherit some funds" from his dad. But he gave them away.

Why?

"I figured we had enough of our own," he said.

He probably did. By 1995, Romney had already led Bain Capital for more than a decade, where shrewd investments made him millions. He stepped down in 1999.

He now says he's worth somewhere between $190 million and $250 million.

How Romney got rich

"I went off on my own," Romney said at the debate. "... What I have I earned. I worked hard, the American way."

So while he didn't ultimately benefit from an inheritance, we wondered: Had Romney's parents' wealth helped build his own fortune?

There's no evidence we saw that Romney's parents helped buy him a business career. But there were certain advantages to Romney's comfortable upbringing.

Romney started college at Stanford, where his "allowance" was big enough for frequent plane tickets to sneak home to Michigan see his girlfriend, Ann, according to a recently published book by two Boston Globe journalists, "The Real Romney."

After a two-year missionary trip to France, where he lived sparely as he proselytized door-to-door, he finished his undergraduate studies at BYU, where he married Ann in 1969. He was 22, his wife 19. His parents' wedding gift? A car. Meanwhile, the students — who started a family a year later — lived in a modest, $62-a-month basement apartment, Ann later told the Boston Globe. But they didn't have to work.

"We were happy, studying hard. Neither one of us had a job, because Mitt had enough of an investment from stock that we could sell off a little at a time," she said.

When the couple moved to Boston so Romney could study business and law at Harvard, his parents helped them buy a house.

It's not clear who paid for his education, but Romney wasn't exactly a struggling student: enough cash for plane tickets, a car as a wedding gift, stock that kept him from having to work, help buying a home. 

What about that hard work he mentioned?