The Accidental Millionaire, Pt. 1

My father died back in 2002.  He was 74, and he died earlier than he might have, had he not smoked for over 50 years.  The smoking led to emphysema, which in the long-term prevents you from getting enough oxygen into your blood through your lungs.  In essence, you suffocate.  It’s not a pleasant way to go.

My mom died in 2000 of the same thing.  They both started smoking in their early teens.  If you smoke, I urge you to stop.  It may not give you cancer, but it does kill lung tissue and causes various kinds of respiratory problems.

I’m unaware of any kind of medical equipment for infusing oxygen into the blood in the same way that our lungs do.  If you’ve got kids and they’d like to make a huge difference in the world when they grow up,  suggest they invent a blood oxygenation machine so people with respiratory disorders can have longer, more productive lives.

My dad never seemed very motivated to change the world.  He was a child of the Depression Years, and as such he seemed to focus mostly on”survival”.  Everything beyond the basics was considered a “luxury”.  We rarely went on vacation, and when we did, everything was done totally “on the cheap”.

Throughout his life, with a few notable exceptions, he was always self-employed.  He seemed to bounce from peddling one scheme to another, and finally fell into a groove of sorts when he got his Real Estate Broker’s License and started his own firm.

It was just himself and his new wife.  He paid for me to get my license so I could work with them, but I decided to go back to college.  I found that selling homes part-time doesn’t mix well with rigid schedules of college classes, so I never really got into it.

I started out as an Electrical Engineering student, but after my first year, I decided I wanted to broaden mystudies a bit.  So I switched to Liberal Arts.  In the end,I got a BS in Math and Computer Science, with minors in Cognitive Psych and Linguistics.

My mom was a speech therapist, and she mostly worked out of the home.

By the time I graduated college, it was pretty clearto me that neither one of my parents would have much saved for retirement.  They weren’t building up any sort of asset base that they could sell when they retired.

So I figured I’d be better off sticking to programmingas it appeared there would always be a nice demand for people with software development skills.

It turned out I was wrong on two accounts.

First, in 2000, the market for software professionals imploded, and it has never recovered.  In fact, it has transformed to the point where it’s virtually impossible for people over 40 to find work today. This is in spite of the cries from the software industry that they cannot find enough “skilled labor” in theUSA,  so they want Congress to raise the H-1B immigration quotas to allow more foreign talent into the country.  It’s essentially a very subtle form of age discrimination that nobody is talking about.

The second thing was that my dad turned into an ”accidental millionaire” as a result of how his Real Estate business grew.

I’ll describe how this happened in Part 2, as it’s quite instructive.

In the mean time, if you’re looking for a great tool to help you write and “spin” articles, check out my own ArticleTwister-2 software.  Another cool app I wrote that’s similar is called TurboReviewWriter.  It helps you write reviews about all sorts of things, and includes many of the “twisting” features found originally in ArticleTwister.

-David