The Education of Millionaires - Michael Ellsberg [86]
In the education department, my wife and I followed the traditional script. I obtained one of the finest and most elite private college educations money can buy. My wife, Jena, dropped out of college during her junior year.
In terms of wealth, however ... well, knowing this book, you can guess what’s coming next.
My wife’s net worth is roughly $500,000. In turn—while I’m proud of the earnings growth I’ve achieved over the last four years—I have only recently dug myself out of the debt I accumulated during my profligate and underearning twenties.
How does a college dropout amass a net worth of $500,000 by the time she’s thirty-two? It has to do with how she invested.
No, I am not going to tell you some amazing trading secret or magic stock portfolio—because that’s not how she did it. She did it by investing—and continually reinvesting—her time and money into her own earning power, a strategy I call Bootstrapping Your Own Education and Success. (I’ll explain much more about the term “bootstrapping” shortly.)
Let’s look into this story in more detail because it contains clues to one of the most important courses you’ll ever take in your life: how to invest your time, money, and other resources for success. This is one of the key secrets that have allowed all the self-educated people I interview in this book, including John Paul and Jena, to become successful.
In 2001, at the age of twenty-two, Jena was living near an ashram in Pune, India, and studying yoga there. She had dropped out of college three years earlier, during her junior year, to follow a passion for yoga. She had been living in India for the previous two years, traveling around on $6,000 she had saved from teaching English in Martinique for nine months right after dropping out. She had been visiting ashrams and meditation centers, and even lived in nature for six months, barefoot. She lived in hammocks, in tents, even in caves.
So far, this does not sound like the story of a woman who was about to amass half a million dollars of net worth over the next decade.
At a certain point, however, Jena woke up to her financial situation. She had been living as a more or less penniless nomadic spiritual seeker in India, and she realized that—while this was cool for her early twenties—the penniless part wasn’t going to stay cool for much longer. (I also spent my early twenties pursuing existential rather than financial rewards, before I realized that the piper had to be paid. Big difference between Jena and me, though: she wised up financially in her early twenties, whereas I remained in my state of denial about money throughout the rest of my twenties.)
“I was very scared,” she says. “I remember, many times in India, thinking, ‘Oh my God, I’ve gotten myself completely out of the system.’ It was like the truism of women who give up their careers for the kids, and then the fear is, every year, they’re that much less employable, that much more out of the system of money and career. In that spirit, I was concerned that I was screwing myself in terms of my career.”
One of Jena’s neighbors in Pune, who was visiting from New York, frequently smelled the food Jena was cooking, and they struck up a friendship, sharing many meals together.
It turned out that this man, Joshua Rosenthal, ran a nutrition school in New York called the Institute for Integrative Nutrition (http://www.integrativenutrition.com), licensed by New York State as a vocational school to train people to become health coaches.
Joshua said to her at one point, “Jena, I see how passionate you are about good food. You should come to my school in New York.” Sensing her time in India was complete, Jena decided this was the perfect next step in her journey. She flew to New York at age twenty-three, landing one month after 9/11. Jena’s family and friends thought she was crazy traveling to New York at that time, but she was determined to make a change in her life.
She stayed initially with her aunt in Jamaica,