E145 Chris Odegard

From Chris:

I wasn’t always The Prolific Investor. I was raised in a middle-class family in Forest Park, Ohio, a suburb of Cincinnati. There I learned precisely what my parents knew, get an education, get a job with benefits and a pension, and invest your money in a well-diversified portfolio of stocks, bonds, mutual funds, and ETFs through a 401K.

And that’s exactly what I did for the next twenty-plus years. I acquired my education at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, Florida and went on to work for The Boeing Company. On balance, my 33.5 years at Boeing were remarkable, a tremendous adventure and learning experience. My travels have taken me to over thirty countries, including Katmandu. How many people can say they’ve been to Katmandu? I had many different jobs over the years; most notable was Director of Contracts, where I wrote and negotiated contracts for the sale of 737, 747, 777, and 787 aircraft to airlines worldwide and one royal family. This is where my love for business was born. While my formal education stopped with my bachelor’s degree from Embry-Riddle, this job was an MBA on steroids! What I learned in big business has helped me tremendously in the small business world in which I operate today.

This path served me quite well in many ways. It put me in the middle class where I raised a family, put two children through college, and was on track for a comfortable retirement at age sixty-five. I was precisely what Robert Kiyosaki calls an “E,” an employee, in his book Rich Dad’s Cashflow Quadrant: Rich Dad’s Guide to Financial Freedom. And even though being an “E” and following the conventional investing worked for me to an extent, I now know that in following that path, I left millions of dollars on the table.

It is a very different time now, and I don’t believe this path will work for my children and other young people today. They will need to be smarter at a younger age than I was. A look at some statistics from a study conducted by GoBankingRates.com clearly tell us that conventional wisdom isn’t working:

34% of Americans have $0 in savings
69% of Americans have less than $10K in saving
46% of Americans have $0 in retirement savings
65% of Americans have less than $10K in retirement savings
49% of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck
36% of Americans believe they are ready for retirement


My prolific-investing journey began in 2008, ten years before I departed Boeing. I experienced a huge illiquidity event where I lost 55% of my assets. In my case, the event was the end of my nineteen-year marriage.

After that, I went from living in a beautiful house in the suburbs with my wife and two children to what I fondly refer to as the van-down-by-the-river apartment, a run-down studio in a shabby part of town with all my worldly possessions fitting within the confines of the bed my 1992 F150 (I still own that truck by the way). No small burden was the thousands of dollars in alimony and child support going out the door each month. If you don’t’ get my reference, see Chris Farley’s Van Down By The River skit on Saturday Night Live.

Shortly thereafter, I read Robert Kiyosaki’s Rich Dad, Poor Dad, and my mind was opened to a whole new world of investing, and a way in which I might extricate myself from this financial abyss. One day in the down-by-the-river apartment, I heard an advertisement on the radio for a free real estate seminar put on by Robert Kiyosaki’s Rich Dad Company. Having recently finished the book and still filled with the resulting excitement and emotion, I eagerly registered for the event. On the day of the class, my beloved truck wouldn’t start. I felt like I was at a turning point, and there was no way I was going to let this stumbling block deter me. I managed to find a rental car company that would deliver a car to my apartment, and I was off to the seminar.