"Whoever said money can't buy happiness didn't
know where to shop." --Author Unknown
There was a moment on January 6, 1990, in Providence, Rhode
Island, when David Posman apparently thought he had made the
business deal of his life. That moment was after he took a bottle
and smashed it over the head of an armored truck driver. Posman
grabbed four bags from the truck and fled. Unfortunately for him,
each bag weighed 30 pounds. He painfully staggered away, and the
police soon found the exhausted thief hiding in a nearby parking
garage. It was right about then that Posman discovered he had
stolen 120 pounds of pennies.
There's a long history of low-IQ criminals botching their
get-rich-quick schemes; one just has to read the newspaper or the
book America's Dumbest Criminals, or watch Jay Leno
ridicule them on The Tonight Show. One robbery suspect who
was apprehended a few years ago protested: "There's no way
he could identify me; I had my hat down over my eyes."
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If only they knew. Becoming rich doesn't have to be so
difficult. "It's almost like you don't have to be a
Wall Street whiz, or have a huge salary, to become a millionaire
anymore. You just have to teach yourself how to become one,"
observes Daryl T. Logullo of the Noble Financial Group in Boca
Raton, Florida. Logullo is also the host of two daily financial
radio shows heard across the nation, The First Word on
Investing and The Final World on Investing.
He's right. In today's nearly Utopian economy, getting
the money isn't the hard part anymore--it's figuring out
what you should do with it after you've got it.
1-800-SOLD-OUT's CEO Justin Fallon, 31, observes, once
you've made your millions, life isn't always the way
you'd dreamed it would be: "Sometimes people treat you
differently. My mom just got remarried, and [at the reception],
people were coming up to my girlfriend and saying, `Can you believe
how much money he's worth?' "
To this, Fallon retorts, "Who cares? People think it's
a big deal. That's weird. I don't want people to think any
differently of me." Then Fallon recites a quote he read on a
tea box 10 years ago: "Judge a man not by what he gains from
his toil, but from what he becomes in spite of it."
On paper, Fallon is worth millions in equity. He founded his
company, which locates hard-to-find and sold-out tickets for
events, in 1987--but it exploded in 1999 with the debut of his Web
site. Fallon didn't want to offer exact figures, but let's
just say his financial worth is somewhere between $40 million and
$60 million. And, like many millionaire entrepreneurs, he's
currently trying to figure out what he's becoming--in spite of
it.
Geoff Williams, like many magazine writers, is not a
millionaire. He had an interesting time writing this story, even
though he cried into his pillow every night. "Is hundredaire a
word?" he wonders.
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