Mindy: Today, we are pulling back the curtain on something many people wonder about, but rarely get to see how the ultra-wealthy actually invest their money. Not the sensationalized stories about crypto or tech billionaires, but the real data on how the top 1% allocate their investments.
Mindy: might surprise you is that while the ultra-wealthy do have access to investment opportunities that most of us don’t, many of their core strategies are actually things you could implement into your portfolio right now. Ready to hear how this might change your investment strategy? Let’s get into it.
Mindy: Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to the Bigger Pockets Money Podcast. My name is Mindy Jensen, and with me as always is my top 1% in my heart co host, Scott Trench.
Scott: Oh, that’s very nice, Mindy. Likewise, and I would argue uh that we should be up there having invested so much time together on this podcast.
Scott: All right. Bigger Pockets has a goal of creating 1 million millionaires, not just in the heart, but literally in your bank account and your net worth statement. You are in the right place if you want to get your financial house in order because we truly believe financial freedom is attainable for everyone, no matter when or where you’re starting. All right, first things first. We’re going to be talking about how the top 1% of Americans invest their wealth. And let’s clarify what we’re talking about with that what top 1%. According to Kiplinger’s wealth report, to be in the top 1% of wealth in America, you need a net worth of about 11.6 million. That’s eight figures in wealth. And the typical Bigger Pockets Money listener does not aspire, at least so they tell us in surveys, no one would say no, of course, but does not aspire the the primary goal is not to generate eight figures in personal net worth and get to this fat fire or top 1% level of wealth. It’s more to get in this kind of 1 to $5 million range with 2. 5 million is the sweet spot for many listeners. But by studying the top 1%, I think that may accelerate many folks journeys towards this and understand here’s how to get there. And of course, if you overshoot, um, no one’s really going to be complaining about that and the optionality that uh even more excess wealth might bring into one’s life.
Mindy: Absolutely, I agree, Scott. I am a little bummed to learn that I am not in the 1%. Uh, but that’s okay. I’m still doing okay. Uh, I wouldn’t mind having $11 million, but I I agree with you. I don’t think that’s where our, the majority of our listeners, and by majority, I mean like 99.999% of our listeners aren’t looking to build even $10 million in net worth. They’re looking to build enough so that they can comfortably live the life that they want. They can retire early if they choose, they can continue working if they choose, but without this pressure of, oh, I have to keep my job uh so that I can keep putting food on the table. They’re they’re looking to be comfortable. Scott, who do you think of when I say the top 1%? I already told you it’s not me.
Scott: I think the top 1% is a executive at a large corporation who has earned a very large income for a long period of time or a business owner or a real estate investor, um or an entrepreneur, I guess is also a business owner um in that category or someone with an incredibly high um skill ceiling like an investment banker or an elite broker or agent, um and there a mortgage broker that has a a an item there or a fund manager. Like those are the kinds of folks that I think are going to make up this list. What do you think?
Mindy: I think our minds are so different. I go billionaire. I think of uh Charlie Munger, I think of Warren Buffett, I think of Peter Thiel. Um, I don’t think of regular jobs. And Frank, on that same token, $11 million gets you into the 1% club. I thought you needed more zeros in order to get to the 1% club. So I was I was uh really surprised by this article.
Scott: So let me also kind of walk some of that back what I just said earlier. I think if you’re looking for the people who make this up, you’re also looking at people who are older, 50 plus and have accumulated based on what I just described, 55 plus, 50, 55 plus, um, in that category that have accumulated at a very high income level for a very long period of time and invested, um, along there. I think there will also be these outlier ridiculous entrepreneurs, money managers like like Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett, and entrepreneurs who have built, you know, several hundred million dollar or several billion dollar businesses early in life. And those guys get a lot of social media press, but I bet you that the majority of this 1%, this majority of this minority are high income earners who spent below their means and accumulated over several decades and they just had a higher than average income and a lower than average expense and invested, um, appropriately in there. There’ll also be a disproportionate skew towards small business owners would be my guess in that category.
Mindy: Okay. I was going to I was going to ask you how you guess that they invest. I was thinking that the 1% is investing in real estate, large scale real estate, not your single family homes, but your large apartment complexes, your large office buildings and in industrial like warehouse things. Private businesses, but like at a higher level. I I said Peter Thiel because when I was thinking of top 1%, I was going billionaires. Peter Thiel famously invested in PayPal and got a bunch of stock in PayPal and when he received it, he put it into his Roth IRA because he had, I don’t know, they were like, it was like a penny a share or something. And he put it all into his Roth IRA and it grew and now his Roth is $5 billion. I love that story so much because that is not at all what the Roth was intended for, but he’s going to pay $0 in taxes on that $5 billion because it’s in his Roth. So another thing that I think they do is make really, really smart, informed decisions. Warren Buffett says that he spends his day reading. He reads every newspaper out there. He reads all the articles online. He just consumes all of this information and kind of stores it away. So when he’s making a decision about buying a business down the road, he’s like, oh, these people have a big moat because I remember this article, that article, and he’s pulling from all of his vast uh knowledge base in his brain. So I think that they are very well educated and Scott, let’s go and see how much they’re doing in crypto.
Scott: Uh yeah. There’s a few crypto ones, I’m sure, but uh I bet you that’s not going to make up a big chunk uh piece of our pie here either.
Mindy: How do you think they invest?
Scott: I think that again, besides excluding these billionaires. every billionaire has some or I think the vast majority of billionaires have some remarkable journey, at least all the ones that are anywhere along that self-made spectrum where they just brought some incredible genius or luck or skill to bear on a a series of moves that paid off handsomely and compounded over a good amount of time. So tho those are, those are the outliers. I’m looking at the person who’s got a $15 million net worth. I’m going back to The Millionaire Next Door, that that book. This is probably somebody that you never would know has a 15 to $25 million net worth by looking at them. Uh, they probably, again, own a small business or have a profession that earns a very high income, but they spend way below that their their means would otherwise allow them to to uh to spend. I believe they will have invested consistently in a small business for a very long period of time. I believe that they will have a significant portion of their wealth in equities, either in index fund like investments or in um, uh uh individual companies, like like companies that they’ve been buying or holding for a very, very long period of time. I believe real estate will be a a major component of the portfolio. I believe that they’ll have a large amount of cash on hand, uh even as a percentage of their their portfolios. Um, I believe they’ll be lightly levered for the most part on a relative basis and uh again with some outliers, but that that’s who that’s what I would be expecting to see here. Um, you know, there’s an anecdote in The Millionaire Next Door about uh about a guy who went to buy a business and was like, well, and didn’t look anything like what the the the seller anticipated a buyer of the business to look like. Very casually dressed, showed up in an old car and uh well, there there he is ready to plop down millions of dollars to buy this business largely in cash. And I think that that’s, I think that that would be my guess.
Mindy: Well, let’s see who’s right, Scott. Now, we need to take a quick ad break. But listeners, I am so excited to announce that you can now buy your ticket to Bigger Pockets Conference BPCON 2025 in Las Vegas, Nevada, which is October 5th through 7th. Score the early bird pricing for $100 off by going to biggerpockets.com/conference while we’re away.
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Mindy: Welcome back to the show.
Scott: All righty, let’s do it. Um, here is the data set. What we’re looking at here is Federal Reserve data which discusses assets by wealth percentile group. The Federal Reserve data does a really good job with this, in my opinion. We have the bottom 50% um discussed, which have a very small amount of the wealth in the country. We then take the 50th through 90th percentile, the 90th through 99th percentile, and we break apart the top 1% into the 99 through 99.9th percentile and the top 0.1% because wealth is so heavily uh skewed in terms of its distribution towards the top 0.1% in this country. And this produces the most most fair visual of this. The Federal Reserve data also allows us to take this and look at the percentages of wealth as they’re distributed across these percentiles. So the top 0.1%, for example, has a very different way that their wealth is distributed compared to the bottom 50th percentile. We’re going to talk about specifically the 99th through 99.9th percentile in our definition of of the 1% so we can exclude Mindy’s friend, Peter Thiel, Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger uh in this discussion and talk much more about my uh uh hypothesized fictional uh small business owner who spent 40 years earning a high income and not spending um very much to accumulate a a large pile of assets here, potentially, we’ll see. Um and in describing this, let’s let’s look at the breakout in terms of percentage of their wealth. Uh again, these are people that that have a wealth of at least on average over $11.9 million. Uh, let’s take a look at the the how this wealth is broken out for these folks. So, first, real estate is 16%. That sounds actually quite low to me. I think as a surprise. Corporate equities and mutual fund shares, publicly traded uh uh stocks, for example, are 44% of the distribution for these folks. The um private businesses are 14% of the distribution and other is 16%. Um, things like defined pension benefit entitlements, consumer goods, um, and uh other types of of pensions and retirement accounts uh that are not uh in in the the after tax brokerage account comprise less than 10% of the wealth uh in terms of asset allocation for this group. Mindy, what are your reactions to this? What surprises you and stands out about this data set?
Mindy: I’m surprised that real estate isn’t a larger amount of their net worth. And again, I’m not talking primary residence. I’m talking about large multifamily buildings, uh commercial real estate. I really had it in my head that the wealthy are all in on real estate. Um I am surprised that 44% of their net worth is in publicly traded companies that anybody can buy, not just the wealthy can buy. Like not anybody can buy an apartment building, you need a lot, a lot of money for that. But anybody can buy a uh share of a stock. Not maybe not Berkshire Hathaway, but B shares. Those are like $4 or $500, right?
Scott: I think that’s the biggest thing that stands out for me as well. And when we look at the 0.1%, 50% of their wealth is in publicly traded companies, corporate equities and mutual fund shares. They also do own about 20 20% of their wealth comes in the form of private business ownership. They own even less real estate.
Mindy: I wonder if that’s just because it’s a percentage of their net worth. So even they might own a lot of real estate. It’s just they also own a lot of publicly traded companies. Um, I have been investing in the stock market for, I don’t know, 30, 35 years and it is up and to the right for the most part, we’ve had some down years, we’ve had some several down years. But I think that you can’t really argue with the top 0.1%, the top 1%, the top 10%. Um it’s when you get into below the top 10%, the 50 to 90%, that you see much more real estate and far fewer uh publicly traded companies. And again, I and let’s go over there and and look right at that. 39, 38.9% is real estate and 9% is publicly traded companies. 16% is defined benefit pension entitlements, 10% is defined contribution pension entitlements, 4% is in private businesses and 15% is in other. I would be so curious to see what other breaks down to. I would love to see that broken out into more categories just because I’m nosy.
Scott: When I look at this chart right here, 50 to 90% and then 90th through 99th percentile, um, I see the middle class trap, right? I see a very large distribution of wealth in what is likely to be a primary residence in the 50th through 90th percentile. I see a very large distribution of wealth in the mutual the the 401k um or other defined men uh benefit plans. I see a very small slice of wealth in corporate equities and mutual funds, which I assume are largely outside of their outside of the retirement accounts. And then I think that there’s a a uh overweighting towards consumer goods and possibly this other category on this. So I think that that’s that’s like the little class trap right here is what I’m seeing.
Mindy: I see that, but I also wonder because 50 to 90 is 40% of the population, that seems like such a large amount. They could have broken it out a little bit more. The bottom 50, I think I’m okay with that being like that, but I would have liked like 50 to 75 and 75 to 90. I think you would have a different breakdown, but also I would be so curious to see what other assets means. And by this, I’m talking about uh crypto and things that that aren’t mainstream or are mainstream, but people who don’t have a large net worth shouldn’t be investing in.
Scott: The other category is remarkably consistent in terms of a percentage of wealth invested across every one of these wealth categories. And Mindy, I I agree, it would be great to see different breakouts for different wealth percentiles. But also, I think that the Fed did a very reasonable job here because these are the largest, these are very reasonable partial like uh pieces of the total wealth of Americans. It’s remarkable that the the bottom 50th percentile, the bottom half of Americans own about $10 trillion in wealth. The top 0.1% own $22 trillion in wealth, right? It’s all like like it’s a remarkable inequality that we’re looking at in this. And so that’s why that’s probably why they visualized the data in these um percentile groups in order to help us understand where that wealth is distributed and how it’s invested here.
Mindy: I am glad you pointed that out, Scott. And also for anybody who’s listening to this on the podcast, uh on audio, it might be a good one to go watch on YouTube so you can follow along with what we are talking about here with all of these different, because we are looking at a chart and it’s pretty fascinating this chart.
Scott: Let’s go back in time here. Let’s this what they do is a great job here. We let’s go back to before COVID. So we’re looking at 2024 Q3 data. Let’s take a look at what happened.
Mindy: Oh my goodness, in the wayback machine.
Scott: I like going to 2019 Q3 as with this. So let’s take a let’s tear this down, right? We see we see different percentiles here. Let’s see what jumps out to us here. Not much. The wealthy have invested very consistently across time um for that. There’s a couple of notable differences though. What do we see, what do we see that there’s seems out most most about where the top 1% or 0.1% invest when we toggle back and forth between the two? So let’s just look at this top 1% here and see what happens. Not much. Pretty consistent. It’s not like one of these asset classes turbocharged it. Let’s go back in time another five years. Right? Okay. Some interesting stuff. The stocks were not nearly as big a piece of that. Real estate started to gain share. It’s going back to 2000 uh let’s go back to 2006 and see what happened there. Real estate’s a much bigger piece of the pie here. And if we go back to 2000, we got our Look at that. The market contractions and expansions begin to make a big difference here. But the story is the same. We’re seeing that wealth is concentrated if we’re these top 1% or top 0.1% folks through time in publicly traded corporations and in privately held businesses with a sprinkling of real estate that actually diminishes as a percentage of the portfolio, the wealthier one gets.
Mindy: This is so much fun to play with. And we will include a link to this chart so you can check it out in our show notes.
Scott: Let’s conjecture here about how these folks got to these positions. And I think that it’s a little easier for me, well, well, we already did that at the very beginning, but I bet you that your 0.1%, your Peter Thiels are largely reflected in this uh this category here. And a big chunk of that corporate equities piece is folks that either made an enormous killing betting on Tesla in the early days or were former employees um of Microsoft or some of these big corporations that really rode these enormous waves of equity ownership up there. Like Nvidia, I saw that like one in like what a ridiculous percentage of Nvidia employees are now millionaires and like some ridiculous percentage are now worth over $25 million because of their equity ownership. So I bet you that reflects, that’s that’s providing um a good chunk of this um for a lot of those folks. I’d also surely there’s entrepreneurs and the uh the executives that have earned earned big compensation in the in these in these companies taking them public or those areas. So that’s got to be one of the the most obvious ways to get into the elite income categories in the United States, right? Is that, would you agree with that?
Mindy: Yeah, I would say so. I mean, my husband worked in tech and a lot of his friends work in tech and, you know, they came together and worked at one company and then they would go off to other companies. And I hear some of these salaries and some of these um stock options that are part of their salary to uh it blows my mind. I had a friend who was working at Amazon and he was getting something like uh 2,000 shares of Amazon every quarter and that’s just part of his salary and that’s, I I don’t know if you follow this, but Amazon, they’re doing okay right now.
Scott: Yeah, I heard they became a pretty big company over the last 20 years. So if you invested in that early, you’re probably in this group. Um, as that and that’s probably one of the, that that’s probably a I bet you there’s a disproportionate amount of this. 0.1% of Americans. Let’s do the math here. How many Americans are there? 341 million Americans. So, 1% of that is 3.4. How many American households? Because that’s what we’re really looking at here. So there’s 132 million American households. 1% of that is 1.3 million. 1.3 million people comprise these two categories, right? 130,000 individual households comprise the top 0.1%. and I bet you that a very good chunk of that uh close to half made their money by having some sort of outsized participation in the growth of one of these behemoth companies in the tech category. Early Facebook employees, uh Tesla employees, Amazon employees, those types of folks, Nvidia employees. Um and and the like. So that’s probably a really good chunk of this. The next biggest chunk of these 0.1% folks are probably are the owners of private businesses. So these are folks that probably built a business and sold it to private equity or are in the private equity uh world there. They’re not quite in that publicly traded category, but that’s how they built their wealth in those categories. I have no idea what other means here. So if anyone listening or watching has an idea what other comprises, um that definition is not provided by the Fed uh on this. So we don’t know what’s in it. And then very few folks uh made it to the top 0.1% by investing in real estate, and I bet you that the top, that those folks are disproportionately large real estate syndicators and fund managers um who have been doing it across decades and really earned their their returns and fees and carried interest on on performing real estate investments of very large scale.
Mindy: Ooh. Okay, let’s look at the key differences between how the wealthy invest and the average investor. So, Scott, would you say the average investor is the top 10% or the 50 to 90%?
Scott: I think the 50 to 90th percentile is the right, right dynamic, right? If you’re in the bottom 50th percent of wealth, you’re likely just getting started or have just begun listening to Bigger Pockets Money. Uh we will help quickly help you move out of the bottom 50th percentile on there into the the top 40 uh the top 50 to 90th, and then um ideally approach the top 10% level of wealth, which is where you’ll need to be to fire. And if you’re not interested in fire, you should not be listening to Bigger Pockets Money because that’s all we do uh on this. So uh or at least the option to fire um for this. So let’s look at the 50th through 90th percentile. and I think the biggest thing that stands out here again is the middle-class trap, right? These are folks that bought a home, have two cars that comprise a good chunk of that wealth um in here in the consumer durable goods or other assets category. Maybe that other includes the cars in this category on this. And all that wealth is in their retirement plans. So that is just not, there’s no option, there’s no way to get super lucky on this. There’s nothing that can actually carry the portfolio through on this, right? If if someone comes in, someone came into Bigger Pockets money podcast for a finance Friday and said, I’m worth 500 grand and I got uh 200 of that in my house, my home equity. I got another 115 in my retirement accounts. I got 35 in my uh outside of after tax brokerage account, and I got a little bit of cash, crypto and two cars in various stages being paid off. We’d tell them, hey man, you need to really think about cutting your expenses, making some life lifestyle changes or drastically increasing your income or otherwise amassing cash and concentrating it in an investment category that could propel you up the chain in a bigger way. This portfolio will not get you anywhere quickly. It is too diversified um on there on too low of a level of net worth to move you across this asset category. You must take more concentrated risks or generate more after tax cash to invest in after tax assets that could propel your wealth forward.
Mindy: What I see is the real estate, which I read as home equity at 38% and unless you are me doing a living flip or Craig Curlop doing house hacking or Scott doing house hacking, or somebody who is using their house to generate income, your home is not an investment. Your home is where you live, it is not part of your investment portfolio, and you can email me at mindyatbiggerpockets.com to tell me how wrong I am, but your home is not an investment. So we’re taking away that almost 40% and looking at the rest of it. Consumer durable goods, I don’t even understand what that means, so I’m going to skip that too because it’s my show and I can. Corporate equities and mutual fund shares. We all know those are publicly traded companies at 9.6%. I love that they’re getting into it. Um but defined benefit pension entitlements. Scott, what do those words mean?
Scott: These are going to be like uh pensions and retirement accounts. So your 401k, your Roth IRA, your pension that you’re building up at work, the TS, the thrift savings plan if you’re in the military. Um all those are going to combine into these these two categories: defined benefit pension entitlements and defined contribution pension entitlements.
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Mindy: Thanks for sticking with us. Why do they have such big words? Why can’t you just say 401k and retirement plans and pensions? But anyway, I digress. Uh private businesses, 4%. I think that is not surprising at this level because I don’t know a lot of small business owners. I know a lot of like, I mean, and the ones that I do are real estate agents. My real estate agency is my business. It’s it’s not really when I consider a business, that’s not really the kind of business that I think of. When I think of a small business, I think of somebody who is selling products or providing goods and services to others. Um so a small percentage of the private business. and then other assets at 15%. I can really see that being cars. I can see that being um, you know, oh, my my friend told me to buy crypto and he’s rich, so I did. I was having a conversation with somebody recently and they said, oh yeah, crypto was up really a lot last year, so I’m doing really well. And I just had to stop. I mean, if your investment is so great, why are you harping it all the time? Like there’s always this hype that’s going on.
Scott: Mindy Mindy, it’s going to make your blood line. as one Crypto bro told me in one of the comments.
Mindy: I don’t even know what that means.
Scott: I don’t know either. But yeah. Oh, oh, and another one, another another crypto bro tells me uh that I will not be remembered because I did not invest in Bitcoin. My legacy will die. Um that’s how important it is. Yeah.
Mindy: Oh, I will remember you, Scott. But I’m also way older than you, so I’m probably going to die before you.
Scott: I do have an update on this one actually. I I I wanted to find the difference between defined pension benefit entitlement and defined contribution pension entitlement. Defined benefit pension entitlements are things like a pension for a teacher or a firefighter or a police officer or those types of things, right? So the the you’re not necessarily contributing directly to them or you’re contributing in in a minor way that’s automated, but this is a pension that is guaranteed by somebody, the government or or a large corporation. This is your 401k, the defined defined contribution pension entitlements.
Mindy: So that’s surprising to me.
Scott: Yeah.
Mindy: The 40, that 40% of Americans that we’re talking about, 40, 16% of them have a pension and 10% of them have some form of 401k that they are building, but it’s not a lot of 401k. It’s back up there. So I would think that corporate equities and mutual fund shares are after tax investments rather than 401k investments. Um maybe a Roth IRA or something. Um so we’re back to the bulk of their wealth is in most likely in their home. Maybe they have another rental property or something, but it’s mostly in their home. and they are absolutely going to fall into the middle-class trap because that’s even harder to access than your retirement accounts. I mean, if I needed to get into my 401k, I can get into it today and just pay a 10% penalty. I don’t want to, but I can get to it with my equity, I have to get a home equity loan, and I have been trying to get a home equity loan and let me tell you, that is not easy at all. So, how do we reach those, those 40% of Americans, Scott? Those are the people that need to be listening to our show. Not that we don’t love all the rest of our listeners, but the 40% right there is really who needs to be listening.
Scott: One question that this does not answer for us though is obviously the the pension or the 401k as a percentage of total wealth declines for the top 1% and top 0.1%. My guess is that that the the the reason for that is not because the top 1% or 0.1% don’t contribute to these things, but because they’ve created so much more of their wealth outside of those accounts that they’re able to max those out. Okay, let’s do another analysis here. So this says it’s $22 trillion in terms of the top total one 0.1% wealth. This is by household. We know there’s 134 million households in America. So there’s 134,000 houses. So let’s do 22 trillion equals 22 trillion divided by 134,000. $164 million. So these people are truly worth uh 150-ish million dollars a pop on there. So it’s no surprise that the 401k, even if you maxed it out every year and invested it reasonably well, you ain’t going to get that beyond about 1.5 million in in a average, in an average lifetime for Americans. So that makes sense. That’s an interesting, interesting finding there. But if you want to get $100 million or more, ain’t going to do it um by having all that wealth tapped in your house.
Mindy: I don’t want to do the work to get the 100 million but I would definitely take it if somebody wanted to start writing checks. That’s Jensen, J E N S E N. And you can email me, Mindy at biggerpockets.com for my address if you want to send me $100 million bucks.
Scott: Yeah, we’ve probably should have defined that at the very beginning of this. But we wanted to we wanted to react in real time to the data set um to have a good discussion about it. I think that that helped things.
Mindy: Okay. So Scott, what can we learn from the investment habits of the 1% and the 0.1% that we could apply to our own portfolios?
Scott: Businesses are the way to get into the truly elite income categories. There’s a smattering of real estate, um that’s a that’s a part of that. Um but and I and I believe real estate is a great way to build a portfolio and get into the millionaire status. I think it’s a a a proven path there, but to get really, really rich, hundreds of millions of dollars, you’re building a business.
Mindy: Or you don’t have to build it, you could buy it.
Scott: You’re buying and building a business, you are participating in the growth of one of these corporate behemoths that go on to have multi trillion dollar valuations, um or you’re building a huge private business or participating meaningfully in a huge private business. But I don’t see another way if you want to get into the top 1% or 0.1% uh outside of that. I mean, even even if you’re a doctor earning huge amounts of money, you’re never going to get into point into the 0.1% unless you get super lucky with something um um out there. You have it has to be a business to get into that. at 0.1% to get $158 million, $154 million, um it’s business uh in there or it’s this it’s the small elite cadre of of wealth managers and and uh which is a business in that are doing real estate or other types of investing with those with those funds.
Mindy: Yeah. And when somebody says business, when you say own a small business, Scott, or own a business, that doesn’t mean you own Amazon. There are so many small businesses out there that you can invest in. Uh Tim Delaney was on our podcast, I want to say it was episode 329 but I cannot remember uh exactly what his episode was, 325. He talked about buying a liquor store and he found this little liquor store near him. It was a mom and pop shop. They still had price stickers on everything. They had no pos system. They had no really any kind of inventory system. And they closed up one night. He and he had negotiated everything and then, you know, they transferred the inventory over he they closed up one night, they did manual inventory all night long. The next day he opened up, he brought in a POS system, he changed he like brought the company up to current standards and has elevated his wealth and that’s not an unusual story. It might not be a story that you have heard before, but it is absolutely not an unusual story. There’s all sorts of small businesses that are mom and pop shops that have been there forever. They aren’t up to date technologically, they aren’t uh, you know, there’s lots of different practices you can do. I was in advertising for 13 years and I can’t tell you how many people just don’t advertise at all. Oh, I don’t want to spend the money on it. Advertising will get you so much more business. as if you’re a good business, I mean, if you’re a garbage business, that’s not going to help you at all. But there’s so many things you can do that a lot of people, a lot of small business owners aren’t doing. They, oh, well, you know, I’m as busy as I want to be. So there’s opportunities out there.
Scott: I’ll call this out. I think that the small business buying opportunity like what what Tim Delaney did, and I think Tim Delaney has a great portfolio and is is is certainly able to live a fire lifestyle from that, uh you ain’t get into the top, you ain’t get in $10 million anytime soon buying a liquor store. right? Just not going to happen.
Mindy: No, but that’s the first step.
Scott: Yeah. So, so you’re going to need to chain together moves like that over many years to get to $10 million or you’re gonna have to do something that’s more scalable um on there. It’s just you’re going to need a lot of time and compounding to do it with those. The way to to what another concept that I’m going to throw out here for the top 0.1%. I bet you more than half of those people got there via some form of meaningful carried interest. Are you familiar with this term, Mindy? Maybe the listener needs. Okay. So, so I I let’s say you join a a company and you get an option grant in that company, right? So you join Amazon when it’s worth $500 million in the early days, right? You get an option grant for 0.1% of Amazon’s future valuation in excess of $500 million, right? I don’t know if that happened on Amazon, but that would not be an uncommon situation for a company like that for a director, VP, whatever the ranges will vary depending on that, right? Um, a CEO would get much more carried interest in that and a chief financial officer less, so on and so forth. But you take Amazon is worth what, like a trillion dollars right now, right? Several trillion?
Mindy: Oh, I don’t know what their current net worth is.
Scott: Amazon market cap. Amazon is worth $2.1 trillion. So 0.1% of $1 trillion is 1 Teslas is what the AI is telling me. That’s hilarious. Uh That’s not exactly what’s happening here. But uh times 1 trillion is going to be there’s a lot of zeros associated with this number. So give me a second here. That’s $1 billion. right? So that’s what, that’s what that that’s the, and and that just probably came as that person’s compensation package. That’s what I mean by these early investors in these companies, right? That is like, how many, how many thousands of people had that happen to them to some degree in Tesla or Amazon, Nvidia, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, now Meta, Alphabet, so on and so forth, right? And the scale, that’s still a large number on a billion or $10 billion company like a Zillow, right or a nerd wallet or something like that. So I bet you that’s a major component of what’s going on here. And that can also, of course, happen in private business.
Mindy: Okay. That is kind of blowing my mind.
Scott: And that’s why people join companies like that, right? In in in those decisions. They want they want a crack at that that upside, right? Another one is the syndicator world, right? Some a syndicator, many this is common to many of the guests that have been on Bigger Pockets in recent years, buys a $100 million apartment complex. They put $40 million in equity. They don’t come up with that. They raise that from other investors. If the apartment complex goes to $140 million in valuation over the next three years, we have a $40 million gain. That gain is split 70/30 with the investors and the person doing the deal. So 30 30 million of that, rounding here, would go back to the investors and 10 million of the profits is carried interest, which is paid out to the person who raised the funds and did the deal. There’s much more to it than that, but that those are likely the mechanisms by which the top 0.1% generated that those 130,000 households uh generated so much incredible wealth.
Mindy: I think that’s really interesting, Scott. It’s it’s a little mind blowing. But I think it’s really, really interesting, something to, something to think about. If you’re younger and you’re listening to the show and you’re like, oh, how can I grow my wealth? I want to be a 0.1 percenter. Go work for the next Amazon, the the next Nvidia, the next Tesla. Ooh, Space X.
Scott: I bet you that those folks disproportionately represent that point, that top 0.1% and that a very small minority of them are the incredible super famous elite athletes. um and and and the billionaires that, you know, you probably recognize by name in many cases around there. I bet you that the silent majority of the top 0.1% are people who got carried interest in private businesses or public businesses that really went on to become huge.
Mindy: And if you are a 0.1 percenter and would like to tell us how you invest, please email mindy@biggerpockets.com or Scott at biggerpockets.com. I don’t think we’re going to get a lot of those emails. But I would love it if we did.
Scott: Yeah, we’d love to have a point top 0.1% on there. We we’ve come up on 1,000 episodes. We want to feature every money story. We have not had a 0.1%, someone that’s worth $150 million of net worth come on and tell their story. Maybe Kevin O’Leary actually would be an exception to that. So he we did have Kevin O’Leary come on.
Mindy: Yeah. Okay. Well, we’ll have to get somebody else on too. Or Kevin, come back.
Scott: Well, with that, should we get out of here, Mindy?
Mindy: We should, Scott. That wraps up this episode of the Bigger Pockets Money podcast. You are Scott Trench. I am Mindy Jensen saying, so long, King Kong.
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