My dad came from Mexico when he was 21. Entrepreneurship was in his blood since he was a kid. He dropped out of school to help his mom raise the other five kids, even though he wasn’t the oldest. He would sell gelatin in the streets because he didn’t want her to have to do it. When he got older, he bought movie equipment (the kind that existed in the 30’s and 40’s) and went from town to town showing movies in the park! When he got bored with that (his words), he bought a taxi and did that for a while.
Coming to the U.S. was tough for him. He worked in the fields in the heat of Texas for a while and then moved to Chicago. Constantly unsatisfied with working for others, he and my mom bought a grocery store of their own for $45,000. My dad settled down there for the rest of his working life. For someone with little formal education, my dad had a great business. He put us through private school and higher education. But he didn’t have all the information he needed to become wealthy and he didn’t have access to it either.
One of my dad’s regrets was not knowing enough about real estate to invest in it. He knew that while he was working hard in his store, there was a man in the neighborhood who had bought up blocks of houses when they were very cheap and was quickly becoming wealthy on investment properties he was renting out. It bothered my dad not to have the knowledge he needed to do the same. In the end, my dad did not financially have much to show for all the years of working in the store. And while it served him and his family well, he spent all his life working it, closing two times a year and one week for vacation, when we would go visit his family in Mexico.