What is the best wealth building business today ?

[Jim]

Knowing what you know now or knowing someone who has achieved a high level of financial success.... If you started all over today, what is the best and fastest wealth building business or vehicle or tool you would use to leverage yourself to reach the upper echelon of financial success ? Creativity comes before money. I am open to all answers. Thank-you

[Garrett]

If you're talking personal prosperity, investing is always the way to go. Get on the phone with a financial advisor to discuss what is personally best for you in that arena. People don't give long term investing the credit it deserves. If you put $5,000 in a mutual or index fund that only earned the AVERAGE return of the stock market at age 20, and didn't touch it until you turned 65 and retired, it would be worth over $360,000. And that's literally not adding anything to that account or even lifting a finger to manage it.

If you are interested in running your own business, there's lots of different avenues to pursue. If you go into it with the mentality that you want to be rich, you probably are taking the wrong approach. Find something that you are passionate about, and figure out how to turn that into an attractive business model.

That being said, the highest returning sector of corporate America for the past 20 years or so has been technology. First it was computers, then the dot-com thing, phones... you get the picture. Recently apps have been the latest "easy startup" moneymaker.
Kevin Systrom (I think that's his name) started Instagram. Two years later, his app company was purchased for $1 billion by Facebook. He owned around 40% of the company at the time. So that was a $400 million payday for him. Not bad for two years of work.
And then of course there are the success stories like Apple. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak started that company with just over $2,000 in a garage. At the peak of its stock price it had a $700 billion market cap, making it the most valuable company in the world. Fun fact: the money they started with is literally 2-ten millionths of a percent of what their company would come to be worth.

In the end, there is no magic bullet. Great financial success usually comes from those who are most driven and are the best at what they do. Unless you are the Kardashians. I'm still not sure what value they add to anyone.