Since the publication of the article “A 27-year-old millionaire reveals how he built his wealth,” on Nov. 4, new details have come to light which have made Anton Ivanov's claims of becoming a self-made millionaire highly suspect. We’ve since issued a correction in the original story and are now sharing more details about how the truth came to light.

Ivanov launched a financial education blog in September called Financessful.com. On his site and in articles written for other personal finance blogs, Ivanov claimed he was a “self-made millionaire” who began investing at age 18 after watching his parents mismanage their finances.

We came across Ivanov’s story first in an article he wrote for a well-regarded personal finance blog. He had written a couple of other guest posts on other blogs, but no major publication had covered him before. We decided to reach out to him for an interview. Our reasons were simple: his was the kind of story that we love to hear and yet so rarely get the chance to tell. He appeared to be a young person who got his finances together at an early age and built his wealth based on a set of basic principles that any financial expert would support — discipline, hard work, budgeting, goal-setting, and low-cost mutual fund investing. On top of that, through his blog, was to help others follow in his footsteps. We wanted to highlight the story behind his accomplishments, especially at a time when millennials are so often criticized for their financial shortcomings.

A screenshot from Ivanov's blog, which he has now shut down. More

In several phone conversations with Ivanov, including a string of follow-up emails, he revealed in great detail how he managed to achieve $1 million in net worth in a little over a decade — from details of his investment allocations right down to his favorite personal finance books. He claimed that he began saving at age 16 and opened an IRA at age 18 with $10,000. When he later joined the U.S. Navy, he said he socked away 60% of his income, which he split between his retirement fund and discount brokerage account. He supplemented his income by earning $20,000 per year from freelance web design gigs he took on the side, he said. He had no debt because he did not go to college, he said. His knew his parents couldn’t afford it, so he decided to take advantage of free education offered by the Navy.

Although Ivanov claimed he was a millionaire, he was honest about the fact that the majority of his assets (about $623,000 worth) were in real estate. Despite this, we still thought his saving and investment strategies were great examples for our audience to learn from. The reader reaction to his post was instantaneous — hundreds of people commented on the story and we decided to invite Ivanov to participate in a live chat on our Facebook page, where he could answer people's questions in person. We were glad, at the time, to give someone who had managed to build their wealth with so few bells and whistles a platform to share his story and encourage others to save and invest wisely.



The truth comes out

Two weeks after the story was published, a former Navy colleague of Ivanov’s, who asked to remain anonymous, sent us a copy of a confession Ivanov posted on Facebook on Nov. 12. In his confession, Ivanov said he lied to Yahoo Finance about the source of his wealth. In the post, he said he “got tired of telling people lies” and he thought it was the “right thing to do.”

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