How Dad Turned $50 into $1.2 Million

America is still the best country in the world for making big dreams come true! There is no other place on this planet where you can go with no money, no education, and no skills and become a millionaire in 20 years, which is what my dad did. He came in 1971 with a wife and three very young girls, ages 5, 3, and 1. His highest level of education was elementary school, Mom had no education at all, and neither of them had any marketable skills. Our entire family had only $50 and a few changes of clothes, and none of us knew any English. So how did my dad turn $50 into $1.2 million by 1992?

Let me tell you how he did it, so you can do it, too.

MAKE MONEY AND SAVE IT

The first thing my dad did for money was get a job—actually two jobs. Since he was unskilled, he took jobs as a dishwasher in a restaurant and a janitor at a church. When he learned from relatives that many Korean women sewed clothes for downtown sweatshops, he convinced Mom to do it for a few extra dollars a week.

Making money was nice but saving it was just as important to our goal of having the best life we could in this new country. Dad controlled all the cash and rarely spent it except for necessities. Rent was a fixed expense. It was cheap because we lived in a very poor area of Los Angeles called Boyle Heights in a small, worn down one-room apartment that no one else wanted. Mom and Dad took buses to work. We kids went to public schools. I babysat them and cooked our meals. We ate rice, eggs, pickled beef, tofu, noodles, and vegetables. We drank water.

Dad’s first big purchase was an old used car. In those days, buying a used car was a real gamble, and he lost on that one. He spent months trying to fix it every day after work and all day on the weekends. After that, he never bought a used car again. He always said a new car was worth not having the headaches.

We never went out to eat, to the movies, or to the mall. I had no idea such places and forms of entertainment or amusement existed. We didn’t even have a radio or TV. I can’t remember if we had a telephone at that time. We had a few cheap toys and coloring books. When Mom had my third and last younger sister, Dad bought her a sewing machine so she could keep doing her sewing work from home.

Mom and Dad never bought any new clothes. They wore the same 3 outfits for a whole year. We kids wore a lot of hand-me-downs from relatives but also enjoyed a few new dresses from Sears for school pictures. Mom sometimes even made our clothes or blankets from beautiful scraps of fabric left over from her sewing work.

MAKE MORE MONEY AND SAVE IT

Dad heard about a better paying job at the airport. It was still mostly unskilled labor but also involved some machine work and general shop work, including operating a forklift and a little welding. He did his best to prove to his bosses and coworkers that he could do it, even though he really didn’t have a clue and his English was very poor. He could be clever, hardworking, and devilishly charming when he wanted. Not only did he get the job, he learned to do it so well that he got as much overtime as he wanted whenever he wanted it—and he wanted a lot!

We kids never saw him during the week. He left before we awoke and came home long after we went to bed. We only saw him during the weekends when we could hear his loud snoring until 2:00 p.m. on Saturday afternoons. By then, he was already dreaming of his own welding business. He spent weekends studying welding books and English books. He often asked me to help him understand them, but a lot of it was too difficult for me to translate. Frustrated, he kept examining the welding photos and diagrams of mouths pronouncing different English vowels. He practiced his handwriting for hours and asked me for frequent critiques and corrections.

Mom kept sewing morning, noon, and late into the night. I helped out every day after school by turning the collars, cuffs, and belts right-side-out and by pulling out the threads on any mistakes she had made. By then, our family had a TV, stereo, and 8-track tape player, so we could watch TV or listen to music while working.

We had family outings to parks, beaches, or mountains. But, we always packed our own food and sometimes even harvested goodies form the mountains or beaches to bring home for later meals. We definitely did not spend much money on anything but rent, food, and gas. Dad socked away the rest—literally in an old sock!

BUY A HOME

For years, we rented apartments, then a house. But, after thousands of dollars spent in rent, we still had nothing but the same temporary place to live in as long as we continued to pay the rent on time. The rent went up every year, and nothing got fixed unless Dad fixed it himself. Someone told Dad he should buy a house as soon as possible, so that’s exactly what he decided to do.

By 1976, Mom and Dad had saved enough money to put a down payment on a little, old, yellow house in Santa Fe Springs. It had a backyard and 3 bedrooms. Although there was only one tiny bathroom for the 6 of us, we were used to that. The living room, den, and garage—plus the extra bedroom and yards—were heavenly luxuries!

START A BUSINESS

Dad began using our garage almost immediately to make metal gates, fences, and window guards on the weekends to sell to small businesses in downtown L.A.

I have no idea how he got his first customers. But, he soon had enough orders to stop working overtime at the airport and start working late nights in our garage instead. He bought a new truck and welded metal posts onto the bed for carrying his tools, brand new welding machine, used steel tubing and such, and, eventually, his finished gates, fences, and window guards. I became his little helper, painting the items by hand and even holding them when he installed them at the stores and apartments. Some people laughed to see a 10-year old girl leaning all her weight against a big piece of metal tubing while her dad welded it to a building.

Dad wanted to quit his job at the airport and run his welding business full time, but Mom hated that idea. She was afraid he would fail and never be able to get his steady job back. She habitually pictured worst case scenarios to every situation, and this was no exception. She argued, “Hadn’t we just bought a house with a huge mortgage? The kids are getting older, so we need the money more than ever. It’s not fair to them or to me to risk going back to being poor all over again.” They fought about this a lot. But, in the end, she really had no choice. He was going to do it no matter what anyone said, and he did. He found a tiny dirt lot with an even tinier shack of an office for lease a few miles east of downtown L.A. It was cheap!

GROW YOUR BUSINESS

Dad took out a Yellow Pages ad and soon had so much business from it that he could afford an adult male employee. I still had to help out by sitting in the tiny, freezing-in-the-winter-and-sweltering-in-the-summer office during most weekends, holidays, and summer vacations, taking phone calls, giving estimates, ordering supplies, and anything else he asked me to do. “Yang’s Welding. May I help you?”

He never turned down work, so he got busier and busier. He invested most of the extra cash immediately back into the business—and socked the rest away. He hired more employees and trained them to do everything he did, except estimating and designing. He bought another welding machine, more tools, and a second, bigger truck. Now, he could be out in the field taking measurements for a new job while his workers finished an installation at another location.

The telephone calls and new orders kept coming in, and Dad kept growing his business. A lot of them were repeat customers by now—or referral business by previously satisfied customers. He expanded his products to include custom made roll-up doors even though he had to buy more expensive machines, some from Korea because he had no idea where to find them here in the U.S. When the competition kept harassing him about not having a state contractor’s license, I helped him finally get his by translating the actual exam for him.

With all my sisters growing bigger, our parents wanted a bigger house. Again, Mom hated to leave her comfort zone to risk a new life in a new neighborhood. But, Dad won that argument, too. He heard from friends there was a development in North Whittier with brand new beautiful houses. He picked one of the biggest: a 2-story, 4-bedroom, 3-bathroom, 2-garage house. It was unimaginably huge to us!

Suddenly, we had a lot of new expenses. We “needed” landscaping, new furniture, a built-in pool, and new clothes for our new schools. We started going to church regularly, and our new church friends invited us to restaurants, movies, ice-skating rinks, amusement parks, and camping trips. Of course, we now “needed” more money to wear the latest fashions, buy the newest gadgets, and pay for this new lifestyle. Some church members were successful professionals and business owners who wore their success proudly on their bodies, hands, and cars. We all “had” to buy new church clothes and accessories. Dad bought Mom a bigger diamond ring to display, and they each got new watches. We got a new station wagon.

We moved again to an even bigger house in an even more expensive neighborhood, Burbank. So, once again, we “needed” landscaping, a built-in pool, new furniture, and so on. Dad replaced the blue Caprice Classic station wagon with a silver Cadillac Fleetwood Brougham sedan and my little tan Chevette hatchback with a black BMW sports sedan. To pay for all this, Dad kept working hard, and I kept helping him during weekends and vacations. Mom finally retired from sewing.

Dad enjoyed work less and less because he could never get over the “betrayals” of employees who left to start competing businesses. Still, he had established the first and best known minority-owned welding business in Los Angeles. That was something to be proud of, and it kept paying for our growing expenses. Then, suddenly, money was so tight that Dad exploded whenever he saw a monthly bill.

BUY PROPERTY FOR YOUR BUSINESS

Dad was furious every time the owner of the shop raised the rent. He finally had enough and decided to leave when a realtor convinced him his credit was good enough to buy his own shop property. This time, Mom didn’t fight him. He bought a large property a few blocks away and moved his business into that location.

INVEST IN RENTAL PROPERTY

The new commercial property was too big for just Dad’s business, so he had planned to rent a large part of it to a commercial tenant. A furniture manufacturing company moved in, and Dad began collecting monthly rent from them, which helped pay for the huge loan on the entire property. Once again, Dad had taken the next step to grow his business. Owning is almost always better than renting.

CONCLUSION

After Dad died, he left over $100,000 in cash, a house that sold for almost $800,000, and a shop that sold for $300,000. That’s $1.2 million! All from the original $50 he brought with him from Korea in 1971. Imagine how much we could have had if we kept our earlier frugal habits! More importantly, I’m sure Dad would have enjoyed life more and lived longer than a mere 56 years if we had.

[For “Millionaires v. Billionaires,” click here.]

[For “Greed v. Desire,” click here.]

[For “How to Be a Billionaire in 10 Steps,” click here.]

[For “Think and Grow Rich,” click here.]

[For more “Easy Steps to Success with Money,” click here.]