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- [00:00]
Mindy Jensen
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. 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 you could implement into your portfolio right now. Ready to hear how this might change your investment strategy? Let's get into it. Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to the BiggerPockets Money Podcast. My name is Mindy Jensen, and with me, as always, is my top 1% in my heart, co host, Scott Trench.
- [00:48]
Scott Trench
Oh, that's very nice, Mindy. Likewise. And I would argue that we should be up there having invested so much time together on this podcast. All right. BiggerPockets 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 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 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 dollars range with 2.5 million as 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, no one's really going to be complaining about that. And the optionality that even more excess wealth might bring into one's life.
- [02:12]
Mindy Jensen
Absolutely, I agree, Scott. I am a little bummed to learn that I am not in the 1%, but that's okay. I'm still doing okay. I wouldn't mind having $11 million, but I agree with you. I don't think that's where our, the majority of our listeners, by majority I mean like 99.99% 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 so that I can keep putting foot 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.
- [02:56]
Scott Trench
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 or an entrepreneur I guess is also a business owner in that category or someone with an incredibly high skill ceiling like an investment banker or an elite broker agent in there, a mortgage broker that has 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?
- [03:27]
Mindy Jensen
I think our minds are so different. I go billionaire. I think of Charlie Munger, I think of Warren Buffett, I think of Peter Thiel, I don't think 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 really surprised by this article.
- [03:55]
Scott Trench
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, 50, 55 plus in that category that have accumulated at a very high income level for a very long period of time and invested along there. I think there will also be these outlier ridiculous entrepreneurs, money managers like Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett and entrepreneurs who have built several hundred million dollars, several billion dollar businesses ear 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 appropriately. When there there also be a disproportionate skew towards small business owners would be my guess in that category.
- [04:56]
Mindy Jensen
Okay, I was gonna, I was gonna ask you how you guess that they invest? I was thinking that the 1% is investing in real est large scale real estate. Not your single family homes but your large apartment complexes, your large office buildings and industrial like warehouse things, private businesses, but like at a higher level. 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 they 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 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.
- [06:29]
Scott Trench
Yeah, there's a few crypto ones I'm sure. But I bet you that's not going to make up a big chunk piece of our pie here either.
- [06:36]
Mindy Jensen
How do you think they invest?
- [06:37]
Scott Trench
I think that again, that's 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 series of moves that paid off handsomely and compounded over a good amount of time. So 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 book, this is probably somebody that you never would know has a 15 to 25 million dollars net worth. By looking at them. They probably again own a small business or have a profession that earns a very high income. But they spend way below that their means would otherwise allow them 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 individual companies like companies that they've been buying or holding for a very, very long period of time. I believe real estate will be a major component of the portfolio. I believe that they'll have a large amount of cash on hand even as a percentage of their portfolios. I believe they'll be lightly levered for the most part on a relative basis. Again with some outliers, but that's what I would be expecting to see here. There's always an anecdote in the Millionaire Next Door about a guy who went to buy a business and was like, well, it didn't look anything like what the seller anticipated a buyer of the business to look like. Very casually dressed, showed up in an old car and well, 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.
- [08:25]
Mindy Jensen
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 BiggerPockets Conference BPCON 2025 in Las Vegas, Nevada, which is October 5 through 7. Score the early bird pricing for $100 off by going to biggerpockets.com conference while.
- [08:46]
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- [09:24]
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- [10:00]
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- [10:41]
Mindy Jensen
Welcome back to the show.
- [10:43]
Scott Trench
All righty, let's do it. 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% 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 99.9 percentile and the top 0.1%. Because wealth is so heavily skewed in in terms of its distribution towards the top 1.1% in this country, this produces the 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 99.9 percentile in our definition of the 1%. We can exclude Mindy's friend Peter Thiel, Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger in this discussion and talk much more about my hypothesized fictional small business owner who spent 40 years earning a high income and not spending very much to accumulate a large pile of assets here potentially. We'll see. And in describing this, let's look at the breakout in terms of percentage of their wealth. Again, these are people that have a wealth of at least on average over $11.9 million. Let's take a look at 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 stocks, for example, are 44% of the distribution for these folks. Private businesses are 14% of the distribution and other is 16%. Things like defined pension, benefit entitlements, consumer goods and other types of pensions and retirement accounts that are not in the after tax brokerage account comprise less than 10% of the wealth 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?
- [13:16]
Mindy Jensen
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, commercial real estate. I really had it in my head that the wealthy are all in on real estate. 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 share of a stock. Not maybe not Berkshire Hathaway, but B shares. Those are like four or five hundred dollars, right?
- [13:54]
Scott Trench
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.
- [14:11]
Mindy Jensen
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. 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%. It's when you get into below the top 10%, the 50 to 90% that you see Much more real estate and far fewer publicly traded companies. And again I went, let's go over there 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 panel 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.
- [15:29]
Scott Trench
When I look at this chart right here, 50 to 90% and then 98 through 99th percent, 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 401k or other defined 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 over weighting towards consumer goods and possibly this other category on this. So I think that that's, that's like the middle class trap right here is what I'm seeing.
- [16:14]
Mindy Jensen
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 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.
- [16:51]
Scott Trench
The other category is remarkably consistent in terms of a percentage of wealth invested across every one of these wealth categories. And Mindy, 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 pieces of the total wealth of Americans. It's remarkable. At 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, 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 percentile groups in order to help us understand where that wealth is distributed and how it's invested here.
- [17:43]
Mindy Jensen
I am glad you pointed that out, Scott. And also for anybody who's listening to this on the podcast 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.
- [17:59]
Scott Trench
Let's go back in time here. Let this. What they do is a great job here is. Let's go back to before COVID So we're looking at 2024 Q3 data. Let's take a look at what happens.
- [18:07]
Mindy Jensen
Oh my goodness. In the Wayback Machine.
- [18:10]
Scott Trench
I like going to 2019 Q3 as in this. So let's take a. Let's stare this down. Right. We see different percentiles here. Let's see what jumps out to us here. Not much. The wealthy have invested very consistently across time for that. There's a couple of notable differences though. What do we see that stands out 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 starting to gain share. Let's go back to 2000. 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 point 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.
- [19:28]
Mindy Jensen
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.
- [19:34]
Scott Trench
Let's conjecture here about how these folks got to these positions and I think that it's a little easier for me. Well, we already did that at the very beginning, but I bet you that your 0.1%. Your Peter Thiel's are largely reflected in 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 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, 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 providing a good chunk of this for a lot of those folks. I also, surely there's entrepreneurs and the executives that have earned big compensation in these companies, taking them public or those areas. So that's got to be one of the most obvious ways to get into that elite income categories in the United States, right? Is that. Would you agree with that?
- [20:43]
Mindy Jensen
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 stock options that are part of their salary. It blows my mind. I had a friend who was working at Amazon and he was getting something like 2,000 shares of Amazon every quarter. And that's just part of his salary. And that's. I don't know if you followed this, but Amazon, they're doing okay right now.
- [21:15]
Scott Trench
Yeah, I heard they became a pretty big company over the last 20 years. So you invested in that early. You're probably in this group as that. And that's probably one of the. But that's probably. 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. Let's talk 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'd bet you that a very good chunk of that, 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, Tesla employees, Amazon employees, those types of folks, Nvidia employees. 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 in the private equity 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, that definition is not provided by the Fed on this. So we don't know what's in it. And then very few folks 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 who have been doing it across decades and really earn their returns and fees and carried interest on performing real estate investments of very large scale.
- [23:06]
Mindy Jensen
Oh, 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%?
- [23:18]
Scott Trench
I think the 50 to 90th percentile is the right dynamic. If you're in the bottom 50th percent of wealth, you're likely just getting started or have just begun listening to biggerpockets Money. We will quickly help you move out of the bottom 50th percentile on there into the top 50 to 90th and then 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 BiggerPockets Money because that's all we do on this or at least the option to fire 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. And here in the consumer durable goods or other assets category, maybe that other concludes 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. There's nothing that can actually carry the portfolio through on this. Right. If someone comes in, someone came into BiggerPockets Money podcast for a Finance Friday and said, I'm worth 500 grand and I got 200 of that in my House my home equity. I got another 115 in my retirement accounts. I got 35 in my outside after tax brokerage account and and I got a little bit of cash crypto and two cars in various stages of being paid off. We tell them hey man, you need to really think about cutting your expenses, making some 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 on there on too low 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.
- [25:14]
Mindy Jensen
What I see is the real estate which I read as home equity at 38%. And unless you are me doing a live in flip or Craig Kerlop 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 mindyggerpockets.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. But defined benefit pension entitlement. Scott, what does those words mean?
- [26:11]
Scott Trench
These are going to be like 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, all those are going to combine into these two categories. Defined benefit pension entitlements and defined contribution pension entitlements.
- [26:30]
Mindy Jensen
My dear listeners, we have a brand new BiggerPockets money newsletter. If you're interested in receiving this newsletter you can go to biggerpockets.com moneynewsletter to sign up.
- [26:43]
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- [27:19]
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- [28:33]
Mindy Jensen
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- [31:43]
Scott Trench
On because Mindy, Mindy, it's going to make your bloodline, as one crypto bro told me in one of the comments.
- [31:48]
Mindy Jensen
I don't even know what that means.
- [31:49]
Scott Trench
I don't know either. But yeah, another one, another. Another crypto bro tells me that I will not be remembered because I did not invest in Bitcoin. My legacy will die. That's how important it is. Yeah.
- [32:01]
Mindy Jensen
Oh, I will remember you, Scott. But I'm also way older than you, so I'm probably going to die before you.
- [32:06]
Scott Trench
I do have an update on this one, actually. I wanted to find the difference between defined pension benefit entitlement and defined company contribution pension entitlement. Defined benefit pension entitlements are things like a pension for a teacher or a firefighter or police officer or those types of things. Right. So you're not necessarily contributing directly to them or you're contributing in a minor way that's automated. But this is a pension that is guaranteed by some body, the government or a large corporation. This is your 401k defined contribution pension entitlements. So that's surprising to me.
- [32:40]
Mindy Jensen
Yeah, 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 for 1k investments, maybe a Roth IRA or something. 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.
- [33:48]
Scott Trench
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 point 1%. My guess is that that 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 1.1% wealth. This is by household. We know there's 134 million households in America, so there's 134,000 houses. Let's do 22 trillion equals 22 trillion divided by $134,164 million. So these people are truly worth 150 ish million dollars a population on there. So it's no surprise that the 401k, even if you max out every year and invest it reasonably well, you ain't going to get that beyond about 1.5 million 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, you're going to do it by having all that wealth tapped in your house.
- [35:13]
Mindy Jensen
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 en and you can email me mindy biggerpockets.com for my address if you want to send me 100 million bucks.
- [35:26]
Scott Trench
Yeah, we 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, to have a good discussion about it. I think that that helped things.
- [35:34]
Mindy Jensen
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?
- [35:43]
Scott Trench
Businesses are the way to get into the truly elite income categories. There's a smattering of real estate that's a, that's a part of that, but. And I believe real estate's a great way to build a portfolio and get into the millionaire status. I think it's a proven path there. But to get really, really rich. Hundreds of millions of dollars, you're building.
- [36:06]
Mindy Jensen
A business, you don't have to build it, you could buy it.
- [36:08]
Scott Trench
You're buying and building a business, you are participating in the growth of one of these corporate behemoths that go on to have multitrillion dollar valuations, 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 in the top 1% or 0.1% outside of that. I mean, even if you're a doctor earning huge amounts of money, you're never going to get into the 0.1% unless you get super lucky with something out there that has to be a business to get into that at 0.1%. To get $158 million, 150, 64 million dollars. It's business in there, or it's this. It's the small elite cadre of wealth managers. And. And which is business in that are doing real estate or other types of investing with those. With those funds.
- [36:55]
Mindy Jensen
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. Tim Delaney was on our podcast. I want to say it was episode 3 29, but I cannot remember 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 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. You know, there's lots of different practices you could 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 are 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.
- [38:37]
Scott Trench
I'll call this out. I think that the small business buying opportunity, like what Tim Delaney did, and I think Tim Delaney has a great portfolio and is certainly able to live a fire lifestyle from that. You ain't getting in the top, you ain't getting $10 million anytime soon. Buying a liquor store. Right. Just not gonna happen.
- [38:58]
Mindy Jensen
No. But that's the first step.
- [38:59]
Scott Trench
Yeah. So you're gonna need to chain together moves like that over many years to get to $10 million. Or you have to do something that's more scalable on there. It's just you're going to need a lot of time and compounding to do it with those. The way to another concept that I'm going to throw out here for the top 1%. I bet you more than half of those people got there via some form of meaningful carried interest. You familiar with this term, Mindy? Maybe the listener needs. Okay, so let's say you join 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 future valuation in excess of $500 million.
- [39:49]
Mindy Jensen
Right.
- [39:49]
Scott Trench
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. 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's worth what, like a trillion dollars right now, right? Several trillion.
- [40:10]
Mindy Jensen
Oh, I don't know what their current net worth is.
- [40:13]
Scott Trench
Amazon market cap, Amazon is worth $2.1 trillion. So 0.1 trillion percent of times $1 trillion is 0.1%. Times.1 trillion is 1. Tesla's is what AI is telling me. That's hilarious. That's not exactly what's happening here. But 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's, that's the. 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 to scale this, that's still a large number on a billion or ten billion dollar 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.
- [41:30]
Mindy Jensen
Okay, that is kind of blowing my mind.
- [41:33]
Scott Trench
And that's why people join companies like that, right? In those positions. They want, they want to crack at that upside. Another one is the syndicator world, right? A syndicator. Many. This is common to many of the guests that have been on Biggerpockets in recent years. Buys $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 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 into the deal. There's much more to it than that, but those are likely the mechanisms by which the top 1% generated. That those 130,000 households generated so much incredible wealth.
- [42:26]
Mindy Jensen
I think that's really interesting, Scott. It's a little mind blowing, but I think it's really, really interesting. Something to think about if you're younger and you're listening to this 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 next Nvidia, the next Tesla, ooh, SpaceX.
- [42:48]
Scott Trench
I bet you that those folks disproportionately represent that top point 1% and that a very small minority of them are the incredible super famous elite athletes 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.
- [43:13]
Mindy Jensen
And if you are a 0.1-percenter and would like to tell us how you invest, please email mindy biggerpockets.com or scottiggerpockets.com I don't think we're going to get a lot of those emails, but I would love it if we did.
- [43:23]
Scott Trench
Yeah, we'd love to have a top 0.1% of there. We're coming up on a thousand episodes. We want to feature every money story. We have not had a 0.1%. Someone with $150 million net worth come on and tell their story. Maybe Kevin O'Leary actually would be an exception to that. So we did have Kevin O'Leary. Come on.
- [43:37]
Mindy Jensen
Yeah. Okay, well, we'll have to get somebody else on, too, or Kevin come back.
- [43:41]
Scott Trench
Well, with that, should we get out of here, Mindy?
- [43:43]
Mindy Jensen
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.