A.A. Bell

As a 16-year-old fresh out of school and working at Woolworths, Anita Bell needed somewhere to keep her two horses. Her family had hit hard times, forcing the sale of their Brisbane Valley farm, but Bell was determined to hold on to her pets.

Her solution started a pattern of canny property investment that allowed her to "retire" at 29, leading to a successful second career as the author of eight personal finance books, including the top-selling Your Mortgage and How to Pay It Off in Five Years (By Someone Who Did It in Three).

To keep her horses, Bell bought a vacant block of land near her home, which cost more than her annual salary - and paid it off within 12 months. Huh?

"I got the property to earn money," says Bell, 39, who still lives in the Brisbane Valley with her husband, Jim, and two sons. She rented out the shed, agisted other people's horses, grew roses to sell and even bagged up sheep poo to earn a little extra cash.

To stop herself spending, the self-confessed shopaholic would stuff a huge G-string into her wallet so she would be too embarrassed to open it in any shop.

When she moved out of her parents' home a couple of years later, the thrifty Bell also owned the family's dining room suite, two wall units, the washing machine, her bed and the garden shed. "My mum said she missed my furniture more than me," laughs Bell, who worked as a payroll clerk in the public service earning a fairly modest salary.

It's not bad for someone who describes herself as "the dunce of the class" until fifth grade, where she received a negative score on a test because she got every question wrong and even misspelt her own surname (then Embrey).

The humiliation proved a turning point, with the teacher taking an interest and boosting Bell's confidence to such a degree that within the year she went from the bottom to the top of the class.

By the time she was 29, Bell and her husband (also a modest wage-earner) owned four properties, debt-free, and she settled into retirement to raise their sons. But a bout of food poisoning a few years later launched her into a new career as a personal finance writer.

Bell was sitting up between bouts of vomiting watching late-night television, including an interview with a romance publisher who said he was looking for more authors. "I thought, 'I can do that,"' says Bell, who was getting bored with retirement and had always loved writing at school.