The Easiest Way to Get Rich

Let me tell y’all a story about Norm, who might be the nicest, sweetest man I know.

Norm grew up on the family farm with his two sisters, and ended up going to school for agriculture. He helped his parents out and eventually inherited the place at a relatively early age.

I met Norm through his cousin, who I used to golf with back in the day.

Farming comes with a lot of downtime — especially in the winter — so Norm tried to make a little extra money with various side hustles. But he sometimes lacked business savvy, so he was a sucker for a sales guy with a convincing pitch.

Norm fell for all sorts of MLMs over the years. He sold for Amway, Watkins, and World Financial Group, all without much success. And those are only the ones I know about. There are probably more.

He also spent thousands of dollars converting his farm trucks to propane, just to save a few cents a litre in fuel costs. The only problem was propane doesn’t work when it gets too cold, so his truck was effectively useless for a couple weeks a year in the cold Alberta winter. I don’t know about you, but that’s not a trade-off I’d be willing to make.

In short, Norm made a few financial mistakes.

There are a few other stories I could tell, but I won’t. The last thing I want to do is air all of Norm’s dirty laundry here. Like I said, he’s honestly one of the best people I know.

Besides, it all ended up fine. Norm is pushing retirement age and will soon be passing on the farm to the next generation, with a portfolio that would easily make 95% of you reading this jealous. Actually, no, scratch that. 99%.

He was successful despite not having much financial education. Hell, he wasn’t even particularly street smart. As I think back to some of Norm’s misadventures, I’m a little bit astonished it turned out this well, actually.

So how did he do it? It turns out he just kept it ridiculously simple, stupid.

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The power of simple decisions, compounded

Throughout all of his financial misadventures, Norm had a simple philosophy.

Whenever farmland came up for sale near his farm, he’d buy it.

Remember, Norm grew up a farmer. He knew the business intimately. Plus, it ran in his family. His grandparents came over to Canada, bought a farm, and then slowly expanded it over the years. His parents took over and they did the exact same thing.

By the time Norm came along, the strategy had been successful for 70+ years.

That’s not saying there weren’t roadblocks along the way, because there were. There are droughts in the 1920s that significantly hurt production. Just when things were getting better, the Great Depression hit. We all know about the severe droughts that hit the prairies during that time, but few people remember the terrible grasshopper infestations. Many farms didn’t have electricity or indoor plumbing until the 1950s or even 1960s. Fuel prices spiked in the 1970s and in the 1980s there was another drought.

And that’s not even mentioning the many years crop yields simply didn’t hit expectations. Or the heartbreaking frustration of watching a hailstorm destroy a particularly promising crop in July.

Norm knew the business and he knew the ups and downs. Despite the negatives and the various lean times, he knew farmland prices had done quite well over the years. He also had a deep belief he was buying up some of the best farmland in the world, backed up by both his practical experience and his mostly long-forgotten agriculture degree.

The patience he needed to pull this plan off was truly impressive. Land didn’t exactly come available at fixed intervals. He once went an entire decade without buying anything. And then, after all that waiting, two parcels near him came up for sale within months of each other.

These days, after 40 years of accumulating (plus the land he inherited), Norm owns a couple thousand acres, which he still mostly farms on his own. The value of his land recently surpassed $5,000 per acre, giving him a net worth of approximately $10M.

This is a guy who seemingly fell for every convincing MLM and who often referred to himself as “just some dumbass farmer.” All he really did was get one thing right and then took it seriously.

And what a result. I love it.

Important lessons from Norm

Norm shows us there are no bonus points for creativity. All that matters is the end result.

They say businesses have to evolve to be successful. Norm proves that doing the same simple thing for 40+ years is also a pretty valid strategy.

Norm took a simple idea and took it seriously. And that’s all he did.

Anyone can follow Norm’s plan. Sure, you might not have the expertise to buy farmland, but it doesn’t take that much to get to a competent level buying stocks or real estate. You can always embrace the ETF route if you don’t have the confidence to go out on your own. Dollar cost averaging for decades is the important part. The rest is just details.

In a world where so many of us spend so much time arguing the details, Norm’s philosophy is frankly pretty refreshing. He shows as long as you get the big picture mostly right, those details don’t really matter that much.

You might think Norm isn’t a particularly smart guy, and he’s the first to admit it. He hasn’t read a book since university, and guys like him regularly tell me my newsletters are “too damned long.” But I strongly disagree. By staying in his lane and playing a game he knows he can win, Norm is much smarter than most people would give him credit for.

The longer I invest the more I realize the beautiful simplicity of plans like Norm’s. There’s a ton to learn from these ultra-simplistic approaches that’s often drowned out by the latest chatter on social media or some pundit trying to sound intelligent as a way to stand out in a crowded market.

Be like Norm and make investing simple, and I think both your present and future self will thank you.