Your Money Matters: Jim Stovall’s ‘Millionaire Answers’ shares steps to build wealth

Building wealth takes time and can often feel out of reach. One Tulsa author and speaker is breaking it down step by step.

Jim Stovall, a Tulsa native, is the author of "Millionaire Answers," a new book born from years of writing his internationally syndicated column "Winners' Wisdom," featured in publications around the world.

Q: Were you always good with money? How did that journey begin for you?

A: "No, none of us start out being good with money, and most of us learn the hard way. For me, it started shortly after I got married, and I was broke. I mean, I had nothing. You’ve met very few people as poor as I was, and thankfully, there aren’t too many people who have been more successful than me. But I learned the hard way. I used to go to the grocery store with my wife, Crystal, and we had all our money in cash, and I had it in my pocket, and we had a calculator. We’d buy groceries till we ran out of money. And one day we misfigured. And right there in front of our neighbors and everybody else, Crystal had to go put a loaf of bread back, and that changed the world for me. I said, I don’t care what it takes, as long as it’s legal, moral and ethical, I’m not going to be poor anymore. I didn’t know I wanted to be rich. I just knew I didn’t want to be poor anymore."

Q: You’re also a national champion Olympic weightlifter and have been blind since age 29. Did that shape your financial mindset?

A: "In losing my sight, I was very blessed to kind of get vision for other things, and one of them was money, because I realized I don’t have as many options as most people have, but it helps me focus on what I do. And yeah, I became a New York Stock Exchange member, and I was an investment broker for years. And then, you know, started writing books that were turned into movies, and I started Narrative Television that helps 13 million people like me. And out of that, a guy right here in Tulsa, at the "Tulsa Business Journal," asked if I’d write a column. I didn’t even know what a column was. He said, just send us a few words of whatever you’re thinking about. And 25 years later, it’s read by 3 million people on four continents around the world, and the questions that came in over those years are the impetus for this book."

Q: Your column "Winner’s Wisdom" inspired the book. Can you talk about one of the chapters — "Boring is Best"?

A: "I want you to have an exciting vacation and an exciting retirement. I want you to go to an exciting place with your money. I want you to have a boring flight. I don’t like exciting flights. I like my flights boring and my trips exciting. And you know, the fastest growing group of new millionaires in America today are school teachers. And I think we could all agree that we don’t overpay our school teachers, and they do that because they do it boring — the Warren Buffett way. They invest a little every month into broad-based securities, and they let time take care of the balance for them.”

Q: Another chapter tackles "Keeping Up with the Joneses." What’s your take on that?

A: “If you’re going to be successful, if you’re going to be wealthy, you need to have an abundance mentality. And the surest way to know you have an abundance mentality is you’re happy when other people become successful. If you’re not happy when they’re successful, you have a scarcity mentality. And you believe there’s just not enough in the world for everybody. So if you get more, I have to have less. And that’s not the case.”

Q: Let’s talk about "The Perfect Investment." What does that look like in your view?

A: “An investment is a vehicle. Money is not a goal. It’s a tool to get to your goal. And the perfect investment depends on not 'what are you doing' or 'how are you doing it,' but why you’re doing it, where you want to go. So if it’s a long-term investment, you know you want growth. If it’s a short-term investment, you want liquidity. If it’s an investment where you know you’ve got something you got to spend, you want safety. And those are the three elements. It’s like a three-legged stool, and there’s no single investment that has all of those. So you really need to know what it is you want this money to do for you.”

Q: What do you hope readers take away from "Millionaire Answers"?

A: “Well, if you took all the money in the world and divided it up evenly, in a few short years, it would be back where it is today, because the key to wealth is not money. The key to wealth is knowledge. And I tried through this book with all the questions people from around the world have asked for many, many years, to boil it down into short things. You don’t have to become an economist. You just have to read short things and learn how to do it.”