When I was growing up, my parents taught me that land was valuable because it was tangible.  They simply did not trust anything they couldn’t see. The fact that people would lose money in stocks merely proved their point. They are not making any more land and as Andrew Carnegie once said “90% of all millionaires become so through real estate”

Over the years, I met other people who believed that businesses were the key to wealth because they were able to amass sports vehicles, yachts and other luxuries that life had to offer. This lead to my question of which (if any) method was clearly superior in achieving extraordinary wealth.

The answer to this question is both simple and clear anywhere in the world. Business ownership is indisputably the method to achieving a high net worth!

If you look at the Forbes list of the world’s richest people, all of them are business owners. They can be in many industries including telecommunications, retail, banking and restaurants to name a few. As for Andrew Carnegie and his quote which has been used to entice many joint venture investors, one must recall that he was a steel industrialist and made his enormous fortune by being a business owner. In today’s dollars, he would be worth hundreds of billions.

Having said all of this, the one asset class which is used to maintain wealth once it has been achieved is real estate. It has a very long track record for keeping pace with inflation.

In fact the most common method to have it all is to make your fortunes in businesses and keep it in real estate. The real estate seminar business generates far more profits than one ever could by completing a foreclosure or renovation. That is what they will never tell you as a member of the audience!