Editor’s Note: Starting today, we will begin featuring guest essays from some of the foremost investing experts in the financial publishing industry every Monday. Today’s essay comes to us from Tom Dyson, publisher of The Palm Beach Letter.

You’ll never guess where I found one of the most valuable nuggets of investment wisdom.

My wife is the activities director at a local home for the elderly. Knowing how interested in history I am, she suggested I come in and interview the oldest resident. 

His name is John, he’s 98 years old — and he has a memory like an elephant. 

John spent about half an hour telling me about the life he has led. There I was, talking to someone with firsthand experience of the Roaring ’20s! Amazing. It blew my mind. 

Then he recalled the Great Depression, the war, and the strong economy of the ’60s.

John asked about my job. I told him I look for investment opportunities and post my research on the Internet. We started talking about the current state of American business and finance. John was well up to date. He knew all about the Internet and the technology boom. He even knew gold had experienced exponential growth in the past decade.

At one point, I complained that finding good opportunities was quite difficult at the moment — that nothing was cheap anymore.

“You’re kidding,” he said. “Making money has never been so easy. It’s everywhere. Anyone who’s not getting rich isn’t trying.”

“But I’m talking about investing,” I whined. “The markets are tricky.”

“No, they’re not. I wasn’t even allowed to own gold. And do you know how hard it was to buy stocks? Even if you knew a broker, he was either a crook or way too expensive to deal with…”

John was right. There’s so much money sloshing around the system right now, how hard could it be to grab some? I live in America, for heaven’s sakes. 

And when it came to investing, John didn’t have access to mutual funds, ETFs and index investments like we do. He didn’t have online trading platforms and discount brokers to choose from. But he still managed.

My conversation with John filled me with an enormous sense of optimism, and I vowed to come back and visit him as soon as possible. 

There’s a common claim made on the Internet that more millionaires were made in the Great Depression than any other time in history. I’ve seen this claim cited on several websites. 

But think about the late ’90s and how many people became millionaires. Or how about the period between 2003 and 2008. Real estate and Wall Street were both booming. 

I heard this stat:

They analyzed the compensation of the 50 highest-paid executives working for Lehman Brothers in 2007. The lowest-paid executive in this group made $8.2 million. The lowest paid. 

The statistic about people getting rich during the Depression is wrong. The reality is, there has never been a better place and a better time to make money than in America from 1782 to the present. 

And right now is probably the best it’s ever been. 

Wealth doesn’t disappear. It just changes hands. And right now, in 2013, there’s more wealth on this planet than there’s ever been before. 

And with governments and central banks around the world committed to low interest rates and money printing, distorting and destabilizing, huge amounts of wealth are going to change hands.

Let’s make sure we have a strategy for capturing some of it.

P.S. — I just spent three months in America’s richest ZIP code investigating the income-generating tricks of the ultra-rich. What surprised me wasn’t how much money these folks were making in retirement, or how they were pulling in yields far higher than what the average American has access to. Rather, I was shocked by how accessible their wealth-building secrets were. One investment, for instance, allows you to collect low-risk yields four to five times higher than the norm, and you can get started with as little as $25. Click here for the full details of my investigation.