The Path to Wealth: Slow Road vs. High-Speed Lane

The ABC quiz show, of course, was the TV manifestation of millionaire mania. And how about the Fox-TV follow-up: "Greed"?

But was art just imitating real life?

The astounding gains in technology stocks in 1999, and Wall Street's appetite for nearly any "dot-com" company that Silicon Valley could dream up, created millionaires and billionaires like no investment craze before it.

Many people made it to millionaire status just by working at the right place. That included about 150 employees of Quest Software in Irvine, for example, thanks to stock options they got when their company went public at $14 a share in August.

The stock's price today: $102.38, a mere 631% gain from the offering price. By comparison, it's taken the average New York Stock Exchange issue 17 years to rise by that amount.

The visionaries behind the Internet boom reaped some of the greatest instant wealth.

Entrepreneur David Bohnett, the 43-year-old founder of Santa Monica-based GeoCities--the largest provider of personal Web pages'--saw his personal wealth cross the $1 billion mark, thanks to the stock he got in Internet portal Yahoo when it bought GeoCities in mid-1999.

And Yahoo, like many tech stocks, can't stop making its shareholders richer by the day: The shares rocketed $42.31 to a record $475 on Monday.

But as captivating as this explosion of wealth has become, it is not, of course, reality for most Americans. And the images worry some financial advisors.

"The Internet mania as we have seen it is redefining our measure of success," says Victoria Collins, a well-known Southland financial planner. "It is no longer hard work and perseverance. It's being in the right place with the right stock at the right time. It's a whole new slant on life."

It's also likely to be fleeting, Collins warns.

"There are many millionaires, but they may be temporary millionaires," she says.

Indeed, many Wall Street pros--even some who own highflying Internet stocks--agree that few of these companies may exist five years from now. The attrition rate even in booming industries often is extremely high.

While the dot-coms get the spotlight, the irony is that plenty of people are on the path to millionaire-dom, but the journey is slower--although the pace certainly picked up in the 1990s, with the stock market's boom and the housing market's significant gains in many parts of the country (including, recently, in Southern California once again).

San Francisco-based research firm Spectrem Group estimated that 7.9 million U.S. households in 1998 had a net worth of $1 million or more. That was more than double the 3.5 million households in that group in 1990.

For many people, the fact that they have accumulated $1 million in wealth, or close to it, often comes as surprise.

"It just sneaks up on you," says Tim Kochis, president of San Francisco-based financial planning firm Kochis Fitz Tracy & Gorman Inc. "It happens little by little. One day you fill out a bank statement and say, 'Well, look at that.' A lot of people would be surprised when they add it all up to realize that they are millionaires already."

That's just what happened to Richard McKenzie. The 57-year-old UC Irvine professor and author of "Getting Rich in America" says he's lived a pleasant, middle-class life, working as a college professor, writing the occasional book and saving modest amounts.

One day three or four years ago, he had to fill out a form and realized with some shock that he was worth well over $1 million. The stock market's generous returns simply lifted the value of his portfolio into territory once inhabited by the "rich."

"Becoming a millionaire is not difficult," McKenzie contends. "That's one of the reasons why I can admit it. All you need to do is work and save as much and as often as you can."

Ralph Roberts, 43, agrees. He's a Realtor in Warren, Mich., who never finished college, but who is well accustomed to 16-hour work days.

Today, he estimates his net worth at around $15 million. He passed the $1 million mark sometime before he got married at age 29, but only knows that because his attorney made him fill out a net worth statement in order to draw up a prenuptial agreement.

"It wasn't life-changing. I still drove a four-wheel drive with a snowplow on the front so I could plow out the rental houses that I owned," he says. "I was the bluejean millionaire."

Roberts now owns a 10,000-square-foot mansion. But he still plows snow around his rental homes and works a grueling schedule.

"It is easy to be a millionaire in this country, but too many people don't want to pay the price," he says. "If you hang out with your high school friends, who sit around and drink beer all night and skip work, that's how you are going to end up."