Weird ways people got rich.

8 ways that people got rich and what we can learn from them. The first way these people got rich is a concept I call insurance that never pays. We all know the grandfather of insurance that never pays, and that's property title insurance. The loss rate here in Texas was 3.2% last year. But there's something even better. I know a guy here in my town. He is a therapist. And what he did was about 30 years ago, he went to corporations and he offered a service to them. I will be on call for your employees. If they ever need to call me, I will offer therapy to them. And something beautiful happened. The company signed up and bought his service. And then another beautiful thing happened. Because those companies offered it to their employees, it was a benefit to them. So the employees were happy. They knew it was always there. But on the other hand, it turned out in the end, the employees never really called. And in this case, he did super well. He ended up selling them insurance that never paid and made a lot of money doing it. This next way to get rich was super fun. It's called Tax Harvest. Facilitating. So here's how it works. An entirely rational big corporation can decide for tax purposes they want to get rid of a piece of fully depreciated equipment. They'll do that and they'll go sell it, and it might be perfectly good, brand new. It could be like a medical imaging machine or a piece of heavy equipment, and they'll go sell it to somebody who will then turn around and be able to resell it on the market. So I have friends who operate businesses that do just this. They go and they purchase depreciated or slightly used equipment, fix it up a little bit, and then put it back out on the market, and they make a profit along the way, and everybody wins. The corporation is happy because they now have changed their tax perspective on these particular items. The person in the middle, who is my buddy, he gets to make money because he's flipping that item to somebody who in the end is the end customer and gets a perfectly good, almost brand new piece of hardware that they can turn around and use in their business. But the best news is they get to do it at a discount. And this is one of those beautiful ways to make money where you create a win for everybody, the original corporation, yourself, and the end customer. This next way to get rich is super fun. It's helping rich people show off. And the way this works is you help rich people show off their wealth or status or how they're just good people. And my favorite corporation that does this is a company located in the Northeast, mostly by the water, and it's called Sea Bags. And the way it works is they go buy used sails that were used on real sailboats. But then what they do, which is really inspiring, is Sea Bags takes those used sails, hires local folks, and they use those folks to create bags out of those old sails. Then they turn around and they sell those bags at a very high profit margin to rich people. Well, you'd say, okay, well, pretty good. But what's exciting about this is they're taking something they bought for very cheap, which which is this old sail that nobody needs anymore, and turning it into a fashion accessory, a branded item that they can sell for a lot of money. By a lot of money, I mean these bags will sell for $150 or $200 apiece, and the cost of goods of what they use to make the bags is like super cheap. And the business has exploded over the past couple of decades. They have dozens of stores now. I estimate they're making millions of dollars a year. So really an opportunity created by helping rich people show off. This next way to get rich is arbitrage. So arbitrage is where you take something from one place and you sell it in another. And so an idea here, for example, be that if you own Bitcoin in Japan, you can take that and sell it at a higher price in the United States. That is arbitrage. I also did this tactic for years. It turned out that Mexico would have a high duty on fireworks imported from China, but they didn't have the same duty on fireworks imported from the United States. So what did we do? We operated a fireworks distributorship. We would allow customers to come buy from us from Mexico, and we would export the Chinese products to them. The Mexican customers won— they bypassed the really high duty that their government had put on everything. We won because we got customers. So living in San Antonio is awesome. You can go to the Riverwalk, you can go to Fiesta Texas, you can go mountain biking, you can go to Chili's. We have everything here. And the cool thing about San Antonio is it's part of this area called the Texas Hill Country, which has all kinds of great places to live in San Antonio, places north and places west, all the way up to Austin. So come here and be my neighbor. And when you do, All City Real Estate can make that process super easy. Their complete move-in package covers moving, decorating, professional organizing, and tech setup. All you need to do is walk in the door. And if you're selling in the area, they can do everything too, from professional staging to cleaning to moving and taking care of any repairs that come up during the sale. Their goal is to make it super easy for you, uh, to come be a resident here in Texas. So definitely get in touch with Megan Pelly at All City Real Estate. You can email her at Megan@mjprealtyteam.com, and that's Megan with an H, so M-E-G-H-A-N. Or you can call her at 210-232-3666. We'll put her contact information below in the show notes. And you can browse beautiful houses for sale in the Texas Hill Country on her website, toptexashillcountryhomes.com. Again, that's toptexashillcountryhomes.com. And thanks to them for sponsoring today's episode. This next way to get rich is called polishing diamonds. And here's how it works. You go find something that's a little bit broken or a little bit off and you go fix it. Then you flip it and you sell it for a profit. I have a buddy whose whole job is to fly around to auctions. And what he does is at those auctions, they are selling heavy equipment. What he does is he buys those, he fixes them up a little bit, repaints them, makes them look good, get them working, and then he goes and sells them on the open market. And how do I know he's doing so well? The way he gets to those auctions is by flying there on his private jet. It's a great business to be in, but you gotta know what you're doing. This next way to get rich involves selling to a very specific type of customer. I call it selling to collectives. So let's think about what happens when you sell to a single person. They worry about a lot. They're going to really focus on making sure you give them a good deal. But when somebody is part of a bigger group, say a city or an HOA or a big organization, and they're making a buying decision on behalf of that organization, well, if it goes wrong, it doesn't really concern them as much as if they were making that purchase just for themselves. And this is an opportunity to exploit that. So, for example, I have a buddy whose business is selling services to HOAs. So the HOA represents a big neighborhood and one member or just a few members on that board are making a buying decision. Do they care about getting the absolute best price for what they're doing? No, they care about minimum hassle. So my buddy and his business exploit that. They are able to sell things at a higher margin, assuming they're going to help that HOA board have as little hassle as they possibly could. So how does he end up doing it? He does really well. He flies around on a private jet. Also, this next way to get rich is called the super profitable side hustle. Here's how it can work, and I'll explain it through an example. So I knew a guy, and his whole business was to go around and do scouting for where grocery stores were going to put their next locations. Well, it turns out when a grocery store goes in, what's really available at that moment is to build other retail right next to it. Dry cleaner, UPS stores, liquor stores, all that stuff wants to be right next door to grocery stores. So what this guy did when he was scouting land for these grocery stores, and when he put a piece of land under contract for that grocery store chain, he would put the next door property under contract for himself. And then he would turn around and he would build a strip center right next to that grocery store. The grocery store didn't mind because having a strip center next door really helped their business, but he made a ton of money doing it just on his own. And today he clears $4 million a year just through all these different strip centers that he's built. In the end, he made a ton of money by having a main job, but then having a very lucrative side hustle. Everybody won, especially him. All right. This next way to get rich is called buy by the acre, sell by the square foot. Here's how it works. You go buy a piece of land, say a big piece of land, and then you sell it off piece by piece. And eventually by selling it off at a higher rate piece by piece than what you paid for the whole thing, you can get all your money back and then some. I know, for example, because I've done this, I bought a 23-acre piece of property about 10 years ago. Over Over the next 5 years, we sold off each individual piece of that property, ultimately for more than we paid for it. But here's the kicker: we kept some of the property for ourselves, and now that is a cash-flowing asset for us. In fact, because we sold off pieces of the land for more than we paid for the original amount, the land actually has a negative cost basis for us. In other words, we got paid to take a piece of valuable property off the hands of the seller. In the end, we won, all the buyers won, and the original seller won. In this way, you can make money by buying by the acre and selling by the square foot. Thanks for watching this video here on YouTube. Having a ton of fun making them. Please turn on notifications. Tell me what you thought of the video below, and I am excited about making these. I'll be back next week.