Multiple income source.

Put your brain to work along with your back. Get paid for both. Any person with a job and a decent financial record can get a loan. Find something that you can buy low and sell reasonably. Do this a few times and build your purse. Get your priorities in order. Never lose sight of the goal! Doing this will get you where you want to arrive.

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Agmantoo
If they can do it,
you know you can!

Pretty much any way to make a lot of money requires ownership of something. You can either have a passive ownership (stocks, bonds, REITs, real estate where you hire out the management), or active mangement (starting your own company, buying a franchise, earn-out of an existing company, owning a farm).

Pretty much any ownership position is going to require savings in order to buy into the ownership. You can earn your way in in some businesses (eg, stock options at a startup company; or at law firms, you work 80 hr weeks for years to make partner, so that then all the associates are working all those hours to make you money). And in some cases you can get an loan to purchase an rental house or apartment complex. However, you'll still need some savings to fall back on to cover for the risks you're taking.

You'll also need to invest a fair amount of time in learning about whatever area you're investing in. If you choose real estate rentals, you'll need to learn something about how to buy it, what vacancy rates you can expect, what repairs might cost, what rules for evicting tenants is, what the fees for having a management company run the property for you are, what local rental rates are, etc. There's a similar learning curve if you want to invest in stocks or bonds, or buy a farm.

In most businesses, the highest paid positions are sales positions. If you have the personality and temperment, that can be quite lucrative, even without any direct ownership.

Any decision has to fit your skills and temperment, and fit in with whatever other career or interests you have. For me, I don't own rental real estate because I didn't want the hassle of worrying about bad tenants, 3 am maintenance calls, and having a large investment/risk exposure to a single source. I've also moved around a fair amount, and had day jobs that required extensive travel before. Therefore I focused more on passive investments, altho that may change in the future.

If the business is somehow related to something you already know at love, you're more likely to be successful at it. Of course, the famous recent example is the guy who has a pez dispenser collection and wanted to sell it, and created ebay in the process.

--sgl