High Finance: How to Become a Millionaire (It Still Happens All the Time)

Just a few years back, Don Over was a craps dealer in Las Vegas, Merlyn Mickelson was a disk jockey in Wadena, Minn., and Al Maisin was a long shoreman in San Francisco. Today all three have one thing in common: they are millionaires. Becoming a millionaire is still an eminently realizable goal for many Americans, and many of them —like Over, Mickelson and Maisin — start the journey with little or no capital and reach the magic $1,000,000 mark well before they are 45. In the past decade, about 5,000 new millionaires have been added to the federal tax rolls.

Despite the dominance of large corporations, increasing competition, and a tax structure that takes as much as 70% of income, it is still easier to make a million in the U.S. than anywhere else. Reasons: a rapidly changing American technology, the shift to a service economy, and the insatiable appetite for new and better ways of doing things. Says Arthur Decio, 34, president of Indiana's Skyline Homes Inc., who rode the mobile-home boom to a personal fortune of more than $5,000,000: "It's easier to get ahead than it was 15 or 40 years ago. Look at the population growth and the tremendous rise in personal income. It's easier to borrow money than in the old days, when bankers were real stuffy. This country is just loaded with opportunities."

The trick is to discover a need, then find a way to fill it. Don Over, 37, saw a need for a trade journal that would tell big builders what major construction jobs were up for bidding: he took over a failing Honolulu magazine and printing press, built up a circulation in 60 countries for his International Construction Reporter (cost: $50 per year). Merlyn Mickelson decided that the computer companies would need a lot of handmade magnetic memory cores, started turning them out in his basement workshop; that eventually grew into Fabri-Tek Inc., in which his stockholdings are now worth $46 million. Al Maisin sensed the hidden values in old neighborhoods, started remodeling dilapidated houses in his spare time, has become a prosperous builder.

Courage Is Needed. Vastly different in their traits and talents, America's newly wealthy entrepreneurs nonetheless share some telling similarities. Ambitious, energetic and supremely confident, they have had vision enough to get an idea, courage enough to pursue it. They were often discouraged by the experts, and they failed frequently—only to rebound. So eager were they to test their ideas that many of them dropped out of college, though dropping out is by no means a requisite for making a million. They made tremendous sacrifices, taking meager salaries at first and pouring the profits back into their business. Many did not marry until they were well into their 30s, and then picked women who would put up with long hours of work. "The young millionaire," says Arthur W. Carlsberg, 32, who has made $5,000,000 by selecting, improving and selling Southern California land, "is the kind of guy people will tell to take a vacation—and he won't know what they mean."