About

Left to right:  Marnye Moore, Chris Odegard, and long-time friend Tony Tsang.  Hong Kong

This path served me quite well in many ways. It put me in the middle class where I raised a family, put two children through college, and was on track for a comfortable retirement at age sixty-five. I was precisely what Robert Kiyosaki calls an “E,” an employee, in his book Rich Dad’s Cashflow Quadrant: Rich Dad’s Guide to Financial Freedom. And even though being an “E” and following the conventional investing worked for me to an extent, I now know that in following that path, I left millions of dollars on the table.

It is a very different time now, and I don’t believe this path will work for my children and other young people today. They will need to be smarter at a younger age than I was. A look at some statistics from a study conducted by GoBankingRates.com clearly tell us that conventional wisdom isn’t working:

• 34% of Americans have $0 in savings
• 69% of Americans have less than $10K in saving
• 46% of Americans have $0 in retirement savings
• 65% of Americans have less than $10K in retirement savings
• 49% of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck
• 36% of Americans believe they are ready for retirement

My prolific-investing journey began in 2008, ten years before I departed Boeing. I experienced a huge illiquidity event where I lost 55% of my assets. In my case, the event was the end of my nineteen-year marriage.

After that, I went from living in a beautiful house in the suburbs with my wife and two children to what I fondly refer to as the van-down-by-the-river apartment, a run-down studio in a shabby part of town with all my worldly possessions fitting within the confines of the bed my 1992 F150 (I still own that truck by the way). No small burden was the thousands of dollars in alimony and child support going out the door each month. If you don’t’ get my reference, see Chris Farley’s Van Down By The River skit on Saturday Night Live.

Shortly thereafter, I read Robert Kiyosaki’s Rich Dad, Poor Dad, and my mind was opened to a whole new world of investing, and a way in which I might extricate myself from this financial abyss. One day in the down-by-the-river apartment, I heard an advertisement on the radio for a free real estate seminar put on by Robert Kiyosaki’s Rich Dad Company. Having recently finished the book and still filled with the resulting excitement and emotion, I eagerly registered for the event. On the day of the class, my beloved truck wouldn’t start. I felt like I was at a turning point, and there was no way I was going to let this stumbling block deter me. I managed to find a rental car company that would deliver a car to my apartment, and I was off to the seminar.

For those of you who haven’t been to a free event like this, while it contained valuable information, it was mostly an upsell to high-priced training packages. Yes, I did it; in the middle of this financial strain, I put a $15K charge on my credit card. My 17-year-old son and I spent the next two years traveling around the country, taking classes on various aspects of real estate investing. It was money well spent! In addition to my modest success, my son is now a successful commercial real estate broker in Seattle.

I made my first real estate investment in 2010 when my daughter decided to move off-campus following her freshman year. Not wanting to pay someone else’s mortgage for the next three years, she and I purchased a duplex near her university, moved her in, and sublet ¾ of the building. We received an $8,000 check as part of President Obama’s first-time homebuyer tax credit, the cash flow and appreciation that followed, and she received some real-world business education while simultaneously managing the building and going to college.

Subsequent investments have included: single-family rentals, apartment buildings, notes, health care startups, movie licensing, private lending, craft-beer brewing, self-storage, ATMs, life insurance policies, and cryptocurrencies. I had varying degrees of success and some failures in these endeavors, as one does with any investing. The most important thing I learned, however, was which investments are the best match for me in terms of my skillset, interest, risk tolerance, tax situation, and how much of my time they consume. In the end, my investment of choice ended up being apartment syndications. It hits all the right buttons for me: use of leverage, tax savings, great returns, limited downside risk, geographic diversification, and takes very little of my time.

Through these alternative investments, I climbed out of my post-divorce financial setback and increased my net worth many times over in a relatively short period. It’s noteworthy that the above list does not include stocks, bonds, ETFs, and mutual funds. My stock holdings are limited to small investments in companies with explosive upside-growth potential and limited downside.

I left Boeing at the end of 2018 at the age of fifty-six and started The Prolific Investor in an attempt to share what I’ve learned so that others might benefit, especially young people who have the benefit of time on their side. Making smarter financial decisions and investments will keep them from leaving millions of dollars on the table as I did and allow them to retire in their thirties or forties instead of their fifties or sixties.

When not increasing my net worth and passive income, I love having the freedom to do whatever I want whenever I want. One of my favorites is long road trips on my motorcycle or in my Z06 Corvette. My children are grown and blazing their paths in the world. I currently live in Summerville, South Carolina with my personal and business partner Marnye Moore.

If you do the things you need to do when you need to do them, then someday you can do the things you want do when you want to do them.

John C. Maxwell