One of my favorite sayings is, “There’s more than one way to skin a cat.” I’ve applied this wisdom in many areas of my life, often in unexpected ways.

The same holds true in investing—there’s more than one way to make money. As I’ve mentioned before, my years in contracting taught me that four groups of people consistently accumulated wealth: doctors, lawyers, real estate investors, and business owners.

Of course, not all my customers fell into these categories, and many built wealth through other means. There’s no single path to financial success—people achieve it in countless ways.

I have been writing about accumulating wealth through the strategy of purchasing dividend stocks, and I want to continue exploring this method in today’s post. In highlighting this strategy, I want to link to this article, titled, “The Most Successful Dividend Investors of All Times” written by the “Dividend Growth Investor.”

One of the investors mentioned in this article is a man named Ronald Read. Why I pick him out of this list is because of his humble life: the article states he “…didn’t have a finance degree, nor an MBA, but was an ordinary Joe who managed to save and invest for the long term.”

Joe was the definition of an “average working guy,” holding two humble jobs—pumping gas at a station and working as a janitor. But as the Wiki article describes, he was a “blue-collar guy with blue-chip smarts.” Despite earning a living with his hands, he invested in blue-chip stocks and became a multi-millionaire.

His story is truly inspiring. It proves that even an “average Joe”—without a finance degree and born into poverty—can build immense wealth through smart, patient investing in quality dividend-paying companies while living frugally.