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But I took her offer as lesson number one in personal finance: Refusing free money is stupid. My $20 weekly allowance for mowing the lawn quickly became a $40-a-week bank deposit. Same with the money I was earning from mowing my neighbors’ lawns. And their neighbors’ lawns. After a few months of crazy lawn-mowing binges, my mom reneged on her deal (teaching me another lesson about free money: It ain’t forever). She thought I was taking advantage of her offer, but I’d like to think I was just being opportunistic (something I’ll get into in more detail later in the book). Regardless of the lost matching contributions, I kept adding to my savings account throughout middle school and high school. My job dressing up as the Chuck E. Cheese’s rat earned me a regular paycheck, as did occasional lifeguarding and coaching duties at the local YMCA. And even in high school, I kept mowing all those lawns. Twenty dollars for an hour’s work is hard to pass up, especially to someone with a limited skill set like me.
Like most, I continued working in college. I still lifeguarded for a bit, waited tables, and bartended. I even earned a big payday by becoming an accidental entrepreneur. My roommate Jeff and I wanted to throw the biggest party possible in the field next to our house. We rented generators and Porta Pottis, hired bands, advertised on radio stations and in newspapers, and bought fifteen kegs for the party. It was a bit risky and definitely a lot of work, but we each invested a sizable portion of our savings to do it. At a minimum, we just wanted to recoup our expenses.
So we had to charge $5 a head. It paid off, though: We had generated so much buzz among all the students that more than six hundred people came! Jeff and I made over $2,000 in unforeseen profit. It was an amazing feeling seeing that much cash on our living room table. If it were sitting in a suitcase, I would have sworn we had done something illegal. Okay, full disclosure: Considering that I was twenty, I was doing something illegal. But it was a memorable and profitable night due to our foresight of securing party permits and observing noise ordinances. Memorable and profitable mainly because for once it didn’t require yelling “Hurry, before the cops get here!”
Anyway, that was then, and this is now. With $10,000 in savings and a dream, I did become a millionaire by the time I was thirty. The point of this book is to let you know
that you can too.
In the following chapters, I’ll break down exactly how I made a million bucks, and the strategies and steps I took along the way. None of them involves selling kidneys from
a Las Vegas bathtub, but, you know, what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, especially if it’s your sold-off kidney. But they do involve key financial decisions that I made: my journey from fledgling real-estate investor, to landlord, to seven-figure flipper, and the gory details about my life as (according to most of the people I’ve dated) one of the biggest cheapskates on the planet.
At the end of every chapter, I’ll show you how I’m doing with a running tally of exactly how much cash I’ve got to my name, as well as a final “Alan Corey 101.”
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