What does it take to amass a million-dollar portfolio? Hint: It doesn't necessarily start with creating your own business or inheriting a hefty sum.

Personal Finance editor HELEN HUNTLEY E-mail: Click here Archive

By HELEN HUNTLEY

© St. Petersburg Times, published April 30, 2000

They may not be as rich as Bill Gates or Michael Jordan, but more than 7-million Americans can claim to be millionaires, including more than 28,000 in the Tampa Bay area.

Meet four Tampa Bay area millionaires.

Some day you could be one of them -- if you have a little luck, a lot of self-discipline and enough years to work on it.

"Anyone can invest his or her way to a million dollars," says Charles B. Carlson, who has written an investor's version of the bestseller The Millionaire Next Door. Many millionaires would agree with him.

Carlson's book, Eight Steps to Seven Figures, is based on interviews with 170 people who assembled investment portfolios of $1-million or more. Although his millionaires are not a scientific sampling, Carlson's book offer a fascinating glimpse into their moneymaking methods.

For the most part, they did not achieve wealth by starting a business, inheriting a bundle or taking home an extra-large paycheck. They never worked for Microsoft, played in the National Basketball Association, answered questions posed by Regis Philbin or lived in Silicon Valley.

Instead, they bought stocks and held onto them for decades.

What set them apart from less successful investors?

"They understood the importance of getting started," said Carlson, who at 39 is himself an investment millionaire.

"That simple hurdle stops a lot of people," he said. "But they were willing to start with imperfect information and knowledge and small amounts of money, sometimes $25 to $50. Eighty-five percent said they didn't know much and didn't have any experience investing."

Bob Bucklin, a retired psychologist who winters in Wesley Chapel, knows about that. He is one of several Tampa Bay investment millionaires who weren't part of Carlson's research but recounted similar recipes for success in interviews with the St. Petersburg Times.

Bucklin made his first investment as an 18-year-old, more than 40 years ago. He says he turned to the stockbroker father of one of his friends to invest $300 he saved from mowing lawns and bagging groceries.

"I asked him what he was buying for Suzy and he happened to be buying IT&T, so he bought some for me," Bucklin said. "About six years later, we sold those shares for $2,400 and bought our first house."

From those humble beginnings, Bucklin and his wife, Mary, have accumulated a stock portfolio worth more than $2-million. They say they lived frugally, invested regularly and diversified by buying and managing rental houses in their hometown of Houghton, Mich. They no longer rely on brokers for investment advice.

Author Carlson said one thing most millionaire investors have in common is a belief that saving and investing are more important than spending. Many bay area millionaires agree.

"I don't have to prove anything to the guy next door," Oldsmar retiree Bert Kaiser said. "The money I saved over a lifetime in stretching the use of a car gave me thousands of dollars to invest when thousands of dollars were worth something."

He may be a millionaire, but Kaiser rides his bike to play tennis.

Joseph Hall, a retired dance teacher in Clearwater, lives on his Social Security check and would rather give money to his relatives than spend it on himself.

"I don't need anything," he said.

The millionaires Carlson interviewed tended to be do-it-yourselfers, gathering advice from brokers, newspapers, magazines and investment newsletters and making their own decisions. Two-thirds said they track their investments with a personal computer, and 40 percent do their own income taxes.

But Carlson said those statistics probably are skewed by the fact that he found most of his millionaires among subscribers to investment newsletters and members of investor organizations.

On average, the millionaires Carlson interviewed for his book had a $2.2-million investment portfolio and a $151,500 annual income, much of it from dividends and capital gains. Eighty percent were men, mostly married, with college degrees and an average age of 60. They had been investing an average of 30 years.

For the most part they described themselves as buy-and-hold investors who do not try to time the market. They invest in what they know, and over the years they have accumulated an average of 44 stocks.

Carlson said he was surprised that millionaires owned so many different stocks until he began looking at how long they held them.

"These people don't sell very much," he said. "If you're investing for 30 years and maybe only adding two stocks a year, you can get to 44 stocks pretty easily. A lot of these people collect stocks like baseball cards."

The bay area millionaires are similar to those in Carlson's book in many ways.

Bucklin said he has owned some of his stocks more than 20 years.

"We've owned Burlington Northern for 25 to 30 years and it's done extremely well," he said.

John Hamilton, who owns Deck & Docks Lumber Co. in St. Petersburg, said living through the 1987 stock market crash made him a believer that buying and holding is best.

"I didn't panic," he said. "I just held on and held on. It was a defining thing that shaped my attitude toward investing. You have to find what you are comfortable with and keep doing it. I don't believe in jumping around and trying to get what's hot."

Of course, not every millionaire holds on forever. Brett Hayman, a St. Pete Beach guidance counselor, borrowed $7,000 from his mom and built an investment portfolio worth more than $1-million in just three years.

"It took a lot of hard work and a bit of luck to achieve this type of performance," he said. He made his big gains buying tech stocks on margin, with borrowed money. But the recent rout on Nasdaq forced him to take more conservative positions.

"I had to put a little more balance in the portfolio," he said. He says he still has his "core" technology stocks such as Nokia, Oracle and Cisco, but he also has been buying so-called "Old Economy" stocks such as General Electric, Home Depot and Citigroup.

On average, Carlson's millionaires spend 12 hours a week tracking their investments. But millionaire habits vary widely. For example, Clearwater retiree Hall, who is 88, spends the whole day watching the market's ups and downs on a QuoTrek stock quote machine even though he makes only 15 to 20 trades a year. At the other end of the spectrum, St. Petersburg businessman Hamilton, 62, devotes one or two hours a week to his investments.

Some enjoy the whole process while others are interested only in the outcome.

"I think the stock market is probably the most interesting novel that has ever been written," said Bucklin, 64. "I'm a student of what's happening. I like the dynamics."

Mary Bucklin, 62, looks at it differently.

"My goal was to have enough money so I didn't have to worry about money," she said. "The numbers don't mean anything."

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