NicheGeek:
Several months ago Silvia Cuevas took stock of her life, and it was a profoundly unsettling experience. At 40 she had a solid job with a modest salary at the public library in Santa Ana, Calif. She’d carefully squirreled away some savings and bought herself a little house.
She was financially secure - and utterly dissatisfied. All around her, Santa Ana throbbed with the feverish energy of recent immigrants eager to cash in on the promises of America. A short drive from Disneyland, Santa Ana boasts one of the highest concentrations of Latinos of any city in the U.S., and these days it is a hotbed of entrepreneurial activity. Cuevas, though, felt as conservative, meek, and, well, dull as a church mouse in Vegas. ‘I was going nowhere,’ she recalls. ‘How was I going to find my fortune?’ Then a girlfriend introduced her to Nouveau Riche University.
Not exactly a university, Nouveau Riche offers real estate investment classes - and a host of related products and services - to would-be tycoons. In April, Cuevas plunked down tuition of $16,000 and attended a weeklong program in Phoenix. 2 weeks later, emboldened by her instructors and an advisor assigned by the university, she refinanced her home, taking out $200,000 - a large share of her equity.
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