Rod Shields is a multimillionaire today. However, his journey began with the purchase of a license plate. Shields explains in an interview that the license plate was the beginning of his great success.
What kind of license plate was it? Rod Shields discovered in the late 1980s that the DVLA (Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency), responsible for managing vehicle registration plates in the UK, offered the option to personalize license plates beyond the standard numbering.
Shields inquired about the official options, eventually registered, and purchased a personalized license plate with the inscription “4VBF” for 120 British pounds. In today’s terms, that is about 143 euros. Shortly thereafter, he was able to resell the license plate for 3,000 British pounds (approximately 3,500 euros today).
He used the license plate to pay for the purchase of a property
Why was this so important? He told the British newspaper The Mirror that the money from the sale gave him the chance to put a down payment on a three-bedroom house. And that is how he began to build the business that made him a millionaire: real estate development.
Real estate development involves purchasing land and properties, developing or renovating them, and then selling them for profit.
Today, Shields is a successful real estate developer and he states that part of his success is attributed to the business of buying and selling personalized license plates. In a conversation with the online magazine Daily Record, he shares:
I now have a real estate portfolio worth several million dollars, and I achieved this solely through that license plate. I attribute the creation of my wealth entirely to the purchase of that plate. It gave me the [financial] boost I needed to do it.
What happened to the license plates? By the way, he continues to run the personalized license plate business as a side hustle alongside real estate under the company UBR Plates. One of his most profitable license plates to date was “BE57APP,” for which he is said to have received over 3,000 pounds. However, he does not specify an exact figure.
A Scotsman takes a different path to becoming a millionaire: he enthuses about a South American country and becomes rich from it. What nobody knows: the country does not exist on any map. But eventually, the scam is exposed, and he ends up in prison in both France and England: A Scotsman becomes a millionaire by selling a fictional country twice
