Richard Stooker


Biography

I hate "about me" pages -- at least, I hate writing them about me.

What I think is really relevant, is my quest to get rich quick, which lasted for many years until I finally figured out the optimum way how investors can get rich slowly, have lots of income to spend without incurring capital gains taxes and remain rich.

I figure, what else do you want to know about me?

Besides, while I don't call myself "old," I have enough years on me to have some feeling for privacy. I don't understand the appeal of social media where people tell the world what they ate for lunch, and somebody on the other side of the apparently actually cares.

Anyway, I'm from the small city of Alton Illinois, right across the Mississippi River from St Louis, so I early on got used to going from one environment to the other learning what it's like to be on a border.

My neighborhood was a classic small town area where I knew the neighbors that had kids. The older people remained inside and so I didn't mix with them. But I had the freedom to run around, climb trees, go in the woods, ride my bicycle and so on.

It took was a border area, though, as just a short block away was the entrance to Fairmount, where lived the very rich people. Some of them were merely upper class, but some of the mansions on the top of the bluff were really large. The famous/infamous -- depending on your political persuasion -- Phyllis Schaffley lived in one.

I don't know if anybody besides servants lived in the Olin Mansion, but its land area was very large. One time while in junior high my girlfriend and I went around the bluffs, visiting Spring Cave and Dry Cave, then went down to Blue Pool, and then walked a long way over to Levis Lane, and some caretaker yelled at us then. We were still on Olin property.

Most people don't consider state borders inside the United States as very important. Politically they're not. But you can still notice differences.

At one point I was a sort of messenger and delivery boy for the advertising department of The Alton Evening Telegraph, the newspaper. One of my jobs when I had to drive over to St Louis was to buy cartoons of cigarettes for employees, because Illinois charged much higher cigarette taxes than Missouri.

The area between the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers -- "between the bridges" -- is St. Charles County, not St. Louis County. This means you can buy fireworks there, so there were several big tents of them erected every June, and they got a lot of customers from both St Louis and Illinois.

That's also the area where I always buy gas, because Missouri gas taxes are lower than Illinois gas taxes.

That doesn't mean Illinois is always the loser, though. When Illinois had a lottery and Missouri didn't, tons of St Louis residents would drive to Illinois to buy lottery tickets. It was wild when the Illinois lottery went up to 40 million dollars the first time. People were flying in to O'Hare Airport in Chicago from Paris France to buy tickets, then fly back home again. So driving half an hour to Illinois from St Louis seemed no big deal.

Many more years ago, Illinois passed a law allowing nineteen year olds to drink legally. Maybe it was just beer, I don't recall. But in Missouri you had to be 21, so certainly created a stream of traffic of nineteen and twenty year olds going to Illinois every Friday and Saturday night to drink legally. The law was eventually changed, however. The lawmakers of Illinois eventually decided to change back to 21.

When I was in high school, one "sport" of some guys was to go "rolling queers."

At that time, Illinois was one of only two states in the U.S. with a "consenting adults" law. Whatever two consenting adults wanted to do, they could. It's all over the U.S. now, but that certainly wasn't the case then.

So gay men from Missouri would drive to Illinois, find the areas of Alton close to the river where there were a lot of trees and bushes and not many people -- if there were no Little League baseball games going on -- and then do what they wanted.

I suppose some actually booked motel rooms, but maybe the local motels didn't want to be seen as short-time "love motels."

Like many young hippies in those days, I dropped out of college after the first one and a half years as an English major, then spent 3 years struggling with minimum wage jobs. I eventually got tired of that and returned to school as an Accounting major, determined to learn something that I could make money from when I graduated.

I eventually wound up in a job with a government agency that required me to interview many low income people. I became quite familiar with the their thinking -- or nonthinking -- about the subject of money.

That, combined with what I learned while in Business School, made me all the more determined to have more money myself.

My government job paid a comfortable salary, but nothing that would allow me to move into Fairmount if I chose.

Meanwhile, my mother was living a comfortable life based on the stocks my grandfather bought for her with the life insurance money from my father's early death.

The dividends had kept growing for decades, allowing her the freedom to have an active social life and visit her grandchildren in Boston periodically.

At one point she showed me the original list of stocks Grandpa bought, and I connected that with my exploration of income investments, and I realized that income investing was the family tradition -- though my mother did think conventionally about stocks, I must admit. She'd look at their current market value, look at her dividends and gripe about the "low yield" she was getting.

She was getting a terrific yield on the amounts she invested way back when!

Just goes to show you that "capital gains" thinking is insidious. It creeps up on all of us.

Years ago I told my mother that if a stock paid a dividend, I didn't want to own it. I was confident in the ability of growth stocks to actually grow. I've totally changed my tune now. My investment funds are now exclusively in income producing investments, mainly stocks with a smattering of bonds, as I advise in INCOME INVESTING SECRETS for people who are not yet retired.

I left my government job a few years ago and now spend all my time studying investing and writing about it and other subjects.

Where to find Richard Stooker online


Where to buy in print


Books

The Chaos Formula    by Richard Stooker
Price: $2.99 USD. 154440 words. Published by Wealth & Health Press  on November 28, 2012. Fiction.

The Chaos Formula is a full-length novel of contemporary fantasy or dark fantasy, with a subnarrative that takes place far in the past, and so could be called historical fantasy. When his boss introduces Jaxon to the Chaos Formula, he doesn't believe. The financial markets cannot be predicted. But when he and the boss's daughter make $1,500 at a local casino playing MiniBac . . .
Stick and the Lion    by Richard Stooker
Price: $0.99 USD. 62880 words. Published by Wealth & Health Press  on August 31, 2012. Fiction.

Tired of magic wand, eye of newt 'recipe' magic? If the power is really in the ingredients, it may as well be a chemistry experiment. If the magician's soul is really so shallow, what's magic worth? Or are real magicians those who can impose their will on the world?
Mabini Shadows    by Richard Stooker
Price: $0.99 USD. 71270 words. Published by Wealth & Health Press  on August 31, 2012. Fiction.

When Dan met Lin Lin on a crowded sidewalk in the notorious Manila bar district of Mabini, he was just looking around, not wanting a woman for the night. Plenty of them anyway. By the time he had to return home, Dan fell in love.
Light of Tina    by Richard Stooker
Price: $0.99 USD. 73070 words. Published by Wealth & Health Press  on August 31, 2012. Fiction.

Paul Templeton fell in love with his sister Tina when his parents first brought her home from the hospital. Physically, he never crossed over the line. Only emotionally. After Tina grew up, an intruder raped and murdered her.
Heaven's Burning    by Richard Stooker
Price: $0.99 USD. 72210 words. Published by Wealth & Health Press  on August 31, 2012. Fiction.

Ted Erickson is an ordinary man ignoring the sins and transgressions of so many people in the world until one day God gives him a special power. A power -- he's sure -- meant to improve society by giving him the power to eliminate the scum of humanity. Justin Bates is an ordinary teenage heavy metal fan contemplating suicide. He just can't decide on the best method.
BloodFire    by Richard Stooker
Price: $0.99 USD. 71050 words. Published by Wealth & Health Press  on August 22, 2012. Fiction.

BloodFire is a vampire story story of the Middle Ages. In the Middle Ages . . . Vampires looked more like George Romero movie zombies than Robert Pattinson. Vampires didn't introspectively brood on the meaning of their existence, like Louis of Interview With a Vampire. Vampires were damned by God, and thus did not possess souls. Vampires didn't act like Clark Gable/Rhett Butler with fangs.
Breakthrough    by Richard Stooker
Price: $0.99 USD. 70600 words. Published by Wealth & Health Press  on August 22, 2012. Fiction.

Terrell Boyd is admitted to Malcolm Bliss Mental Health Center. Diagnosis: Schizophrenia, paranoid type He claims to be the latest in a long line of world saviors. Are his paranormal powers real? Or is he just crazy? What if both are true?
The Wrong Bettor    by Richard Stooker
Price: $0.99 USD. 74660 words. Published by Wealth & Health Press  on August 22, 2012. Fiction.

The Hunger Games, The Running Man, and other stories depict futures where 'gladiators' must battle to the death to entertain the masses. How about dueling not by old-fashioned physical combat, but through Virtual Reality computer games? Winner makes a boatload of cash. Loser dies.
The Copper Quarter    by Richard Stooker
Price: $0.99 USD. 73690 words. Published by Wealth & Health Press  on August 22, 2012. Fiction.

Down the mean streets of the near-future, a man goes . . . Where -- The economy resembles the 1930s more every day, except for inflation jacking prices skyhigh. Ownership of gold and silver is again illegal, but that doesn't stop corrupt politicians from using them to finance electoral campaigns. Environmental problems impose severe restrictions on everyday activities.
The Pi-a-saw Bird    by Richard Stooker
Price: $0.99 USD. 72830 words. Published by Wealth & Health Press  on July 16, 2012. Fiction.

In 1673 two French explorers were the first European white people to journey down the Mississippi River. They encountered many strange and frightening new things. New animals, some of them hostile. New Native American cultures, some of them hostile. But on the river's bluffs just north of current-day Alton Illinois, they saw the painting of a monstrous flying creature.
The Death of Capital Gains Investing (and What to Replace It With)    by Richard Stooker
Price: Free! 5000 words. Published by Wealth & Health Press  on December 6, 2011. Nonfiction.

The longest bull market in history peaked in October 2007. The last twelve years have been a "lost dozen." Thousands of Americans are in city parks whining the stock market is a scam and capitalism no longer works. The old paradigms have shifted. Where're the 10% average annual gains the experts promised the stock market would deliver?
Stock Market Investing for Beginners: How Anyone Can Have a Wealthy Retirement by Ignoring Much of the Standard Advice and Without Wasting Time or Getting Scammed    by Richard Stooker
Price: $2.99 USD. 21730 words. Published by Wealth & Health Press  on October 23, 2011. Nonfiction.

Want to get started investing in the stock market, but aren't sure how to do so? What are stocks? What determines their market prices? Why do they go up and down? How can I beat the stock market? What are mutual funds? What are index funds? What are Exchanged Traded Funds?
REITs Around the World: Your Guide to Real Estate Investment Trusts in Nearly 40 Countries for Inflation Protection, Currency Hedging, Risk Management and Diversification    by Richard Stooker
Price: $4.99 USD. 30590 words. Published by Wealth & Health Press  on October 15, 2011. Nonfiction.

Claim Your Share of Real Estate Investment Trust (REIT) Profits From Around the World NOTE: the Table of Contents is fully linked. Ever since so many private real estate companies converted themselves into Real Estate Investment Trusts and held IPOs in the mid-1990s, U.S. investors have been receiving high dividend yields.
The Immortality Pill - Available Now    by Richard Stooker
Price: $2.99 USD. 10680 words. Published by Wealth & Health Press  on August 25, 2011. Nonfiction.

This is a short report -- around 10,000 words -- on the amazing health and anti-aging benefits available right now to seniors who wish to postpone old age and death for as long as possible. This work is all-original and all-unique. The purpose of this short report -- to tell you about the Nobel winning medical research on telomeres and telomerase which may hold the key to an extra long life.
Bring On The Crash! A 3-Step Practical Survival Guide: Prepare for Economic Collapse and Come Out Wealthier    by Richard Stooker
Price: $8.99 USD. 37600 words. Published by Wealth & Health Press  on August 17, 2011. Nonfiction.

The U.S. dollar is on the verge of catastrophe. For the first time in history, the debt of the most powerful government on Earth, leading the world’s largest economy, has been downgraded by Standard & Poor’s to Double AA from a perfect Triple AAA.
Income Investing Secrets: How to Receive Ever-Growing Dividend and Interest Checks, Safeguard Your Portfolio and Retire Wealthy    by Richard Stooker
Price: $9.99 USD. 78410 words. Published by Wealth & Health Press  on April 10, 2010. Nonfiction.

Finally, you too can discover the old-fashioned -- yet now revolutionary (and updated for the 21st century) -- "gold egg" income investing secrets for lazy investors Despite following the conventional financial wisdom, many senior citizens are now asking what happened to that worry-free fun and relaxation they promised themselves after a long career of hard work. What's the alternative?
Virgin Blood: A Hardboiled Horror Thriller    by Richard Stooker
Price: $2.99 USD. 148300 words. Published by Wealth & Health Press  on April 9, 2010. Fiction.

(5.00 from 1 review)
"Janie is one of the best fictional characters I've come across in a long time -- beaten but not broken, earthy yet innocent, a thoroughly modern saint. . . . at the end of the book, I almost broke into tears. And you have the stylistic sophistication to be able to blend gritty realism and outright magic and pull it off. In short, VIRGIN BLOOD is a marvelous book." -- Dave King,
Master Limited Partnerships: High Yield, Ever Growing Oil    by Richard Stooker
Price: $9.99 USD. 34870 words. Published by Wealth & Health Press  on April 9, 2010. Nonfiction.

In a low yield world government bonds pay next to no interest, S&P 500 stocks pay little more than that in dividends, the Canadian government is on the threshold of taxing income trusts, and real estate investment trusts are suffering cash flow problems, one type of security stands to income investors. Master Limited Partnerships This is the only book devoted only to this type of investments.
Beat the Flu: Bird Flu, Swine Flu, Seasonal Flu -- All Flu    by Richard Stooker
Price: $4.99 USD. 63710 words. Published by Wealth & Health Press  on April 9, 2010. Nonfiction.

Flu experts agree -- a severe pandemic is just a matter of time. But there are many other ways to protect yourself and your family. They are cheap and widely available. Everybody can take steps to protect themselves and their families. BEAT THE FLU is a comprehensive guide to build your immune system to prevent and treat the flu. It explains the proprietary 7 Perimeter Defense System.

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