FAST TALK: Your Money

John Z. Rigos

Founder, president, and CEO
Sagework
New York, New York
Can you lose what you never had? It certainly felt that way to me.

It was December 1999. I'd sold my dotcom for $42 million. My two partners and I each walked away with $8 million in stock. I'd grown up poor, the son of Greek immigrants. This was a dream come true.

Then the dream ended. From the day of the sale until the day when I could legally sell my shares, the stock tanked. I ended up with a fraction of my original take. Then Bill Gross at idealab courted me as an entrepreneur-in-residence. Idealab was about to go public. Theoretically, my options could have been worth $40 million. Then the Internet market collapsed; idealab never went public, and my options were worthless.

I lost everything -- twice. But worse than losing the wealth was losing my identity. I couldn't even think about working again. Today, I have a certain sense of calm. Those years were the most amazing period of my life. But they warped my priorities. There was a time when I was so obsessed with my company that my girlfriend left me. It was only after I had lost my fortune that she took me back.

John Z. Rigos (jzannis@yahoo.com) cofounded cductive.com, a music- distribution company that he and his partners sold in 1999.

Mark Cuban

Owner, Dallas Mavericks
Dallas, Texas
The basic worry that comes with having lots of money is no different from what worries everyone else. Whether you've got $100 or $100 million, you don't want to lose it. After we sold Broadcast.com, I hedged my stock with synthetic indexes, in case the market cratered in the six months before I could hedge my actual Yahoo shares. It cost me $20 million, but I protected what I had. Todd Wagner and I had a credo: "Pigs get fat; hogs get slaughtered."

My bank account never defined what was important in my life, and that's true for today. I still like eating roast-beef sandwiches, spending time with my fiancée, and going to the movies. I don't think about money when I get on a scale; I wonder why I can't lose weight.

Still, there's no denying that money has given me freedom. That's the best part about being rich. Money also gives me the comfort of knowing that my parents can go on trips wherever and whenever they want and that my brothers and their families will never, ever go wanting.

Some people claim that having money creates headaches. Not really. I had headaches when I didn't have money to pay the rent.

Mark Cuban (mark.cuban@dallasmavs.com) and Todd Wagner sold their company, Broadcast.com, to Yahoo for $5.7 billion in July 1999. In January 2000, Cuban bought the Dallas Mavericks.

Thomas J. Stanley

Author
The Millionaire Next Door and The Millionaire Mind
Marietta, Georgia
The past few years have shown everyone that fast money goes as quickly as it comes. That doesn't mean you should be despondent. It's still possible to become wealthy -- especially if you avoid classic mistakes.

The first is to confuse wealth with income. Wealth is what you accumulate in assets, not what you make or spend. People who accumulate great wealth often live frugally. They don't care about status. They care about being independent. If your goal in becoming rich is to look rich, your chances of success are remote.

Another big mistake is to choose the wrong job. Making lots of money at a job that you hate doesn't work. People who accumulate wealth love what they do. Why? Because if you don't, you'll spend all kinds of money to compensate.

Which leads to one final mistake: to have a job in the first place. The average self-employed person has a net worth five times greater than people with jobs. Most people who love what they do work in businesses that they started.

Thomas J. Stanley's The Millionaire Next Door (Longstreet Press, 1996), coauthored with William D. Danko, spent 200 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list.

Barbara Ehrenreich

Author
Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America
Key West, Florida
I'm baffled by failed executives who demand huge severance packages to "maintain their lifestyle." They should try to get by on $7 an hour. I did -- and I learned a lot.

The biggest surprise: It's expensive to be poor. Without a bank account, you have to pay to get your checks cashed. Without extra cash, you can't buy in bulk to save money. And it's almost impossible to find a place to live, even if you can make the rent, because you can't make the security deposit.

Stock options and 401(k)s? I had a coworker at Wal-Mart for whom buying a polo shirt on sale for $7 -- a required part of the uniform -- was out of the question. I drove in car pools to housecleaning jobs where a tollbooth presented a crisis: Would the boss reimburse us?

What struck me when I returned to my real life was how easy it felt. With money, things just happen. Need to get across town quickly? Take a cab. Don't feel like cooking? Order takeout. The ease of it is miraculous. Maybe that's why it's so easy to ignore people who aren't part of the miracle.

Barbara Ehrenreich writes for Time, Harper's, and The Nation and is the author of 12 books. For Nickel and Dimed (Metropolitan Books, 2001), she took a series of minimum-wage jobs to understand daily life among the working poor.