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.

Website: http://www.incomeinvesthome.com/
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LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/richardstooker
Blog: http://www.incomeinvestingsecrets.com

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