Young and Stupid: How to make $2.5 Million by 21 Years Old and Lose it ALL in 12 months

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A web entrepreneur who had it all by the time he was 21 managed to blow his staggering $2.5million fortune in just 12 months.

Andrew Fashion dropped out of high school to live the high life – his monthly $100,000 pay packet seeing him buy a plush Los Angeles house and several top-of-the-line sports cars.

He played high-stakes poker in Las Vegas, flew to London, Florida and Hawaii, and bought all the latest tech gadgets.

But within just one year his websites, which gave users the tools to ‘design’ their MySpace pages, fell out of favour and the cash GWOP dried up.

Bankrupt and suffering from depression, he admitted: ‘I was young and stupid. The money was coming in so strongly, but it went out just as fast. A lot of the money just disappeared.’

Fashion, whose real surname is Thompson, built his business through months of shrewd marketing which saw his sites topping Google’s search rankings.

But a radical 2007 overhaul of the website meant Google believed it was a brand new page. It lost its Google ‘reputation’ overnight and plummeted to the engine’s eighth page.

Now not so visible, visitors dwindled and the income stopped. But Fashion still had overheads to pay, and a $400,000 tax bill he had not counted on.

He told Business Insider how it all went wrong: ‘I bought my first car, in cash. I bought my house and had $80,000 dollars of renovations done to it. I ended up buying seven cars total, a few for my friends.

‘I had a girlfriend. I lost a lot of money in Vegas. I got into poker. I bought a lot of toys, photography equipment, technology, ton’s of clothes, and trips.

He said his friends tried to fleece him of his hard-earned income, with one stealing $5,000. He said: ‘I found out who my real friends were. Five of my friends back-stabbed me.

‘This guy was a good friend for a year or two and we hung out often. Then he told me that he would give me a deal at a shop, because he worked at BMW.

‘He ended up taking five grand. I definitely learned a lot. I have a lot of haters, I guess. But I also have a lot of people who are really positive and who are rooting for me.’

Getting better: Now, after what he described as a roller-coaster few years, he is firmly back on track and living in Littleton, Colorado

He managed to raise $150,000 without any money in the bank, made a cool $250,000 from internet advertising and is now launching a model social networking website.

He oversees a photography company called ‘Fashion N Glamour Studios’ and a book called ‘Young and Stupid: How I Made And Lost $2.5million’ is also in the pipeline, with a release date scheduled for the end of this year.

And this time, he insists, he will not be so quick to waste his hard-earned cash.

He added: ‘Instead of blowing money on toys and cars, I am going to invest it back into the company or another company. I will do the typical saving, like 401(k)’s and rainy day funds.

Wealthy: Andrew Fashion’s market-leading websites gave users the tools to ‘design’ their MySpace pages

Easy come, easy go: Andrew Fashion made millions of dollars, but then lost it all when his company took a turn for the worse

‘But before I even start my retirement account again, I’m going to invest: real estate, stocks, commodities – whatever I can do.’

And in the future, he said, his real calling will be as a real-estate developer.

He said: ‘Not an internet guy. I love the internet and I will always work with it, but my ultimate goal is to build casinos, hotels, and nightclubs.

‘I’ll start in the Denver area, open a night club with a partner, and then eventually will move to Las Vegas and California to build some hotels and casinos. I want to be a skyscraper guy.’