The start, finish, rise and decline of wealth displayed in both The House of Spirits, by Isabel Allende, and One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel García Márquez, portray two comparable yet contrasting ideas as to the occurrence and progression of fortune. Whether it is Allende's portrayal of one single, great fortune ascending with long, hard labor and plummeting with neglect or Márquez's tale of spontaneous affluence, whichever tale tells a more realistic tale of material prosperity, both stories draw vivid illustrations as to life cycles of money. In their beginnings, both depictions illustrate the same idea.

Money needs to come from somewhere, and whether it be direct in its continuance or not, the only way to start wealth rolling is with work. In The House of Spirits, the Trueba family fortune is revived when Esteban Trueba left to work his inherited yet neglected hacienda, and with his hard work, made it '...[the] biggest and richest [hacienda] in the whole area... [and] an example, the envy of everyone around, a model hacienda." (page 65 HoS) Esteban near-mindlessly worked the backbreaking job of restoring his hacienda by day and well into the night until his money multiplied and he created his ever-growing fortune, the growth of which he never could have anticipated. Though he had a hacienda to his name as an advantage over other men of his impoverished state, the work needed to kick-start its swelling income and keep it from falling back into ruin was an impressive task which took many years to accomplish, just as setting up a business of immense good fortune and wealth would require from any willful man seeking similar results. Similarly, One Hundred Years of Solitude features the Buendía family matriarch, Úrsula Iguarán, who came from a rich family but whose only financial inheritance was a trunk of colonial dubloons which proved near useless in a life of utter destitution and who revived her fortune with the making of "little candy animals [to sell]... [with] baskets of bread and a prodigious variety of puddings, meringues, and cookies... [and eventually] she [had] accumulated [a grand fortune]... over long years of hard labor." (page 59) Úrsula started from scratch, not using any of her inheritance to supplement her flourishing fortune and succeeding just as well as Esteban with his haciendas. This conveys the idea that money may start only with work, regardless of whatever advantages one may receive. However, to make the work work to one's desires, the right people are needed to support the fortune.

The women featured in both stories are the generators or maintainers of wealth. In Hundred Years, Úrsula, who began the family's wealth, and Petra Cotes, who caused a "delirious prosperity" (page 20 cool of animals breeding rapidly and with that another immense fortune, are the sole breadwinners of the entire family. Though their roles as the providers are neither directly nor fully addressed, Petra Cotes does receive recognition from Auerliano Segundo as being the cause of the massive. Úrsula, on the other hands, is never given much credit of her initial fortune by other characters, but continues on her way of good fortune, eventually finding and hiding gold coins which, despite her desires for the wealth to leave the family, provides another fortune for the last generations of the Buendía line. In HoS, Esteban realizes that "despite the fact that he was constantly hatching new schemes, his finances seemed to have been dwindling since Clara's death." (page 30 cool Just as in Hundred Years, when the prosperous female characters either die or begin to fade from the story's action, the fortunes go straight downhill. This might be explained by a lack of drive created by disconnection with the world without love, in the cases of Petra Cotes and Clara del Valle, or the simple lack of influence of one who supported the family for so long a time but eventually lost the ability to carry on the work, as with Úrsula. As similar as the two stories may be in the plots of their fortunes, their life cycles of cash are markedly different.
In House of Spirits, money lives for one long, set, period of time before dropping back into ruin when it goes neglected, while in Hundred Years, giant fortunes and extreme poverty come and go sporadically. Esteban Trueba "[grew up] in dire poverty... when [his] mother became ill and [his] father died," (page 42) but upon restoring his hacienda, he reached extreme heights in his fortune, allowing him such excesses as a "silver-lined door" (page 92) to top all the other ;uxuries of his newly built, gargantuan house, until Clara's death, when "his finances seemed [to start] dwindling." (page 30 cool Trueba's progression of fortune starts at the bottom and moves upwards and upwards until it reaches its climax and begins to descend back to where it started. The straightforwardness of Trueba's fortune is explained by the fact that Esteban worked to resolve his problems with love, and upon Clara's death, no longer finds much of a will to keep up and put heart into his finances and life. In Hundred Years, "little candy animals" (page 59), "delirious prosperity" (page 20 cool , and the rediscovery of the coins of the "plaster statue" (page 209) are examples of the random fortunes found in throughout the story, along with the radical bouts of misfortune where their meals become just "a scrap of meat and a little rice." (page 347)