Have you ever drove past a really huge house and thought to yourself “Man, I wonder what they do for a living so they can afford a house like that!” Well Ryan D’Agostino, author of Rich Like Them: My Door-to-Door Search for the Secrets of Wealth in America’s Richest Neighborhoods, wondered the same thing. He found a list of the 100 wealthiest zip codes in America and decided to visit those towns, and knock on the doors of the biggest houses he could find to see how the homeowners had acquired enough wealth to be able to afford such huge and magnificent homes. D’Agostino was basically acting as a door to door salesman, but instead of pitching a product, he pitched the idea of his book to the homeowners to see if they would share their story of wealth so that he could write about it and hopefully inspire others in their quest for wealth.
I really enjoyed reading this book. It’s not a “How to get rich” Book. It’s a “How THEY got rich book”, and it just proves one of the points that I try to make on PassiveIncomeInfo.com, and that is that there’s an infinite number of ways to acquire wealth. I have to give praise to D’Agostino for having the guts to just walk up to those homes and make his pitch to whoever answered the door. Most of the houses he went to, no one answered the door. Others that he went to, maids or housekeepers answered the door and said that the owners weren’t home. Some homeowners answered the door, but said that they weren’t interested in his book. But then D’Agostino would find someone willing to invite him in, and share his or her story with him.
The stories that D’Agostino had collected for his book very interesting. He writes about how he knocked on a door and met Bob Grosnoff, who became a stockbroker in 1969 and became wealthy by helping big-money clients invest their money in safer alternatives than stocks while the stock market was swinging wildly up and down. He also writes how he met Frank Heurich, who became wealthy by helping an inventor named Gregor Jonsson lease out his shrimp-peeling machine to shrimp businesses all around the world. D’Agostino also writes about his friend Scott Zdanis, who revolutionized the credit-card processing industry at 23 years old and bought a Ferrari less than a year later. Those are just a few of the stories that D’Agostino writes about in his book. Other stories involve people becoming rich with real estate, art, and even produce (yup, fruits and vegetables).
Rich Like Them is an inspiring book, and I recommend it for inspiration to those who are on their quest of becoming rich.