Two months later, she collected more than $3,800. By the end of 1999 she had taken in more than $65,000 -- nearly twice her earnings as a writer. "That's when I realized that I'd better invest in this baby," says Touby, 45.
So she tapped contacts to help her write a business plan and find investors. By 2000, she had lined up $1 million commitments from two investors in exchange for an ownership share. Mediabistro managed to weather the bursting of the dot-com bubble, the stock market's nose dive and the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Frugal with her investors' money, Touby created a new revenue source by offering online classes and seminars for a fee.
Last year, Jupitermedia bought Mediabistro -- and its robust online traffic of 7 million page views a month -- for $23 million. Touby's personal share is $12 million before taxes -- and more if future financial goals are met.
She and her husband, journalist Jon Fine, continue to live in their Brooklyn apartment while searching for a loft in Manhattan. "After getting this huge amount of money," she says, "we want to be careful not to lose it."
Millionaire Lesson No. 5
Plan for the very long term. Gary Gardelli waited two years to get the job he wanted and more than 30 years for the payoff.
Gary Gardelli chose his career path at age 4.
"I had a little red fire engine with push pedals and a bell," says Gardelli, now 55, "and that's pretty much when I decided what I wanted to do."
In junior high school, he realized an added benefit to being a firefighter: the pension. And then there's the job security. Economies boom and wane, but protection from fires is a basic, universal need.
At age 20, Gardelli studied fire departments in the Denver area, including their benefits and retirement plans. He picked suburban Bancroft, Colo., as a place to live and work and attended college for two years while waiting to be accepted for training.
Then he stayed put for 31 years and seven months. "It was better than I ever thought it could be," says Gardelli, who turned down managerial promotions so he could keep fighting fires. "I liked being one of the guys in the trenches. I made lieutenant, and that's where I stayed."
For most of his working years, Gardelli knew exactly when he would retire --November 2006 -- because that's when a lump-sum pension payout would amount to $1 million. He decided to take the lump sum because the lifetime-payment option offered skimpy survivor benefits to his wife, Cindy, in the event that he died first. "This way," he says, "it's all hers."
Managing $1 million is a big responsibility, especially when you retire at age 54 and want the money to last for perhaps 40 years. Gardelli already had experience investing Cindy's retirement-plan rollover when she left firefighting eight years ago. Plus, he amassed about $100,000 in his employer-matched 401(a) plan, a tax-deferred plan for public-sector employees.
Gardelli worked with a financial planner to invest the money, gradually putting it in a diversified portfolio, composed mostly of stock funds, and keeping some in a guaranteed account that earns about 5%. "I'm taking it slow and easy," he says.
Even as millionaires, he and Cindy still look for ways to save money.
"We play lots of golf, ride the motorcycle, goof off," says Gary, who saves about $5,000 in annual golf-course fees by working six hours a week as a golf-course marshal.
Cindy works two days a week in a veterinary clinic, which provides them with free care for their three fox terriers and Chihuahua.
Says Gary, "We're having so much fun."
Millionaire Lesson No. 6
Combining an old way of doing things with a popular new trend will resonate with customers and clients.
Cyd Szymanski knows how to hurl an egg, a skill she perfected as a farm kid in southwestern Missouri. (Aim for the barn post, she says, the better to splatter the guts, and hope they hit your brother.) She also knows how to score a breakthrough in the tradition-bound egg industry.
Szymanski turned a foundering startup called Nest Fresh into a company with sales of more than $5 million. In the process, she showed her competitors -- and members of her own family -- that cage-free chicken eggs could be profitable.
"I wasn't the first, but I was darned close," Szymanski says. "Soon, all the big guys jumped on the bandwagon."
When Szymanski, 51, was growing up, most egg farmers considered caged chickens to be "the modern way, the good and positive way," she says. That included her grandfather and uncle, who then owned one of the biggest egg producers in the U.S.
By 1991, however, her father and brother had hatched a plan to produce cage-free eggs in Colorado. Szymanski left her job as a hospital marketing director and moved to Denver to join them. Their distributor reneged, leaving the business $60,000 in debt. Her father and brother walked away from the enterprise.
But Szymanski hung on. She processed and packed the eggs herself and delivered them to small grocers. "I would drive an hour to the farm, work, drive back into town, deliver the eggs, go to my apartment, try to figure out where all the money had gone and what I was going to do, go back out to farm, do some more work, come home about 11 at night and do the books. It was a scary existence," she says.
Her big break came when King Soopers, the leading grocery chain in Colorado, agreed to carry the eggs, and a local newspaper wrote about Nest Fresh. Customers liked the look, taste and idea of the cage-free eggs enough to buy them at $2.79 a dozen, more than three times the price of regular eggs.
Once Nest Fresh took off, Szymanski's relatives jumped into the business, and so did other big grocery chains. "Farmers are not known for forward thinking," she says. "The market had to be booming."
As for Szymanski, in 2006 she sold the Nest Fresh brand to Hidden Villa Ranch of Fullerton, Calif., for a sum that put her squarely in the millionaire column. "I wanted to change the way eggs are produced in the U.S.," she says. "I accomplished that."
Now Szymanski and her husband, Steve, enjoy a cushy life that includes neither eggs nor chickens, both of which Szymanski dislikes. They invest in real estate and take horseback-riding vacations with their 8-year-old daughter, AnnaBelle.
Says Szymanski of her wealth, "I have 'eggsistential' guilt."
Millionaire Lesson No. 7
It doesn't take a fortune to build one. Saving a little at a time is an established path to accumulating wealth.
You don't need to earn much to make millions. Paul Navone, 78, never made more than $11 an hour as a quality-control inspector in a glass-container factory. But last year he gave $2 million to two New Jersey schools. He has about $1 million more saved for his retirement.
Navone, who lives in Millville, N.J., was hired by Wheaton Glass when he was 16. After taking a break for Army service, he returned and moved in with his older sister (paying her for his room and board) until he scraped together $6,500 to buy his own duplex at age 23. He lived in one half and rented the other. Eventually, he bought two other properties in Millville and two in Atlantic City.
Income from his rentals paid Navone's living expenses. "I never spent any of my wages," he says. He owns no phone or TV. He collects Hummel figurines -- dozens of the ceramic pieces decorate his home.
But for the most part, he squirreled his money away in savings and investments, and he gives credit to "four very good brokers." Navone invested in "a little bit of everything" and stuck with a buy-and-hold strategy. He is partial to utility stocks, with their steady earnings and dividends (which he always reinvests).
When he retired two years ago, Navone couldn't help wondering "what all this accumulation was going to amount to." He decided to give part of his fortune to St. Augustine College Preparatory School in Richland, N.J. His current broker, Douglas Smithson of Wachovia Securities, suggested that he also speak to Cumberland County College in Vineland, N.J.
Last year, Navone donated $1 million to the college for its nursing-education program and $1 million to the high school for a swimming pool.
"I never had the pleasure of a swimming pool," he says. "I used to go to the swimming hole at the gravel pit."
Millionaire Lesson No. 8
Forgo the safe route and find an employer who will help you live up to your potential.
By the numbers, Gurtej Sandhu is one of the most prolific inventors in the U.S. What's more, he has parlayed his education and ingenuity into millionaire status.
Sandhu holds more than 700 patents, which puts him among the top 10 patent holders in the nation. He works for Micron Technology, which makes memory microchips that are used in most digital devices, from cell phones to MP3 players. The semiconductor business faces cutthroat competition, and all of Sandhu's patents focus on making microchips more efficient.
The son of two chemists, Sandhu, 47, was always attracted to math and science. "I liked engineering better than medicine because I didn't have to deal with blood," he says. He earned a degree in electrical engineering from the elite Indian Institute of Technology in New Delhi and received a doctorate in physics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1990.
Turning down a job offer from a bigger rival, Sandhu joined Micron, which at the time ranked 16th among makers of memory chips. His physics professor and mentor, W.K. Chu, persuaded Sandhu to take the Micron job because it would give him an opportunity to learn many aspects of the chip-making business rather than being locked in to a specialized job at a larger company.
Inspiration comes quickly, says Sandhu -- "Suddenly it clicks, and there's a flash" -- but it takes dedication to develop an idea from creation to a patent. And sometimes, you don't even comprehend the magnitude of what you've discovered. For example, Sandhu developed a method of coating microchips with titanium without exposing the metal to oxygen, which would ruin the chips. Initially, he didn't think his idea was a big deal, but now most memory-chip makers use the process.
Micron is based in Idaho, and Sandhu enjoys bike riding and spending time with his wife and two teenage sons in and around Boise. "The isolation works for me," he says. "I'm more open to new ideas here."
