Saturday night my wife and I went out for a really nice dinner at a very high end restaurant. How high end? The main courses cost about as much as our normal weekly food bill. The entire evening cost about as much as groceries for a month. Rest assured, that wasn't a place we could afford to eat on a regular basis. It was one really terrific meal though.

Over coffee the next morning we pronounced the previous evening a resounding success - the best meal we'd ever enjoyed together. We want to go back sometime because really enjoyed ourselves. It was well worth the tremendously high price.

If you've been reading here a while you know we have a rather extensive home remodeling project going on. I'm happy to report at long last we're nearing completion. In a few weeks' time we should be saying good-bye to the last of the contractors we hired to do work here.

Now that we're seeing the light at the end of the tunnel our stress-o-meter is starting to come down out of the "critical" range. Soon we hope to be completely relaxed and enjoying the benefits our hard-earned investments have brought us.

Here's a flash for you. You don't have to be really smart to build wealth; but smarter people make more money.

Don't believe everything you read, OK? This does make interesting reading however. Jay Zagorsky is a professor at Ohio State University. He recently completed a study of 7,500 middle-aged Americans and found that the higher your IQ is, the more money you tend to make. You make roughly $200 and $600 more in income for every IQ point you score higher than the next person.

He also found that building wealth has little correlation with intelligence.

Intelligence is not a factor for explaining wealth. Those with low intelligence should not believe they are handicapped, and those with high intelligence should not believe they have an advantage.

Without even knowing it I have put this amazing finding to work in my own life strategy for building wealth.

I'm kicking off next week with one of those big charity golf events. You know the ones, the kind where you pay some huge amount of your hard-earned money for a round of golf, a middling meal and a presentation from the beneficiary organization.

These events are the only times I play golf any more. I used to play all the time because I enjoyed the idle time and because I had this dream that wealth somehow was about a country club membership and time on the golf course. Along the line somewhere - probably in the woods off the sixth hole - I decided I was doing my career and my bank account no good at all on the golf course.

I could hardly stand to read this story about a .com millionaire. Here's a guy, arguable a successful entrepreneur, who has had the good fortune to launch several successful businesses in his lifetime.

At least a couple of them were internet startups that put his net worth solidly in the eight figure range. He's set for life. Now you might think a guy this smart would cash some of it out and lock in those gains. You know, secure his financial future.

Instead, he leverages his personal fortune, taking on debt against his dot com boom inflated personal portfolio to buy a bunch of rich boy toys. You know what happens next. The bottom falls out of the market. His net worth plunges, leaving nothing on the asset side of the balance sheet to counterweight the debts on the liabilities side.

Time for the lawyers. Now he suing his investment bank, the guys who funded his startups and granted him the personal loan. He claims they were negligent in not hedging his portfolio against losses.

Let's tally up the score here. Where might he have gone wrong?

• Lack of diversification. He had all his golden eggs in one basket

Let's say on your way to work each morning you stop in at the local coffee establishment and purchase a cup of your favorite roast, ground and steamed and served up just like you like it. Let's say you shell out roughly $2.50 for that cup of bliss. Now let's say you do that every day for 10 years.

What's the cost of your morning ritual? It works out to about a thousand dollars a year. Your morning cup on the way to the office over a ten year period costs you about $10,000.

Now lots of people will tell you that's money spent foolishly. They'll tell you that money could have been invested rather than consumed. Had you done that your own personal net worth would be about $20,000 north of where it is now. (Starting 10 years ago you were at zero. Now you're out the $10k, but had you invested it you would have $10k. The difference works out to $20k.)

But would it? Would it really?

Is the coffee you prepare on your own as good as that which you buy at the coffee shop? The taste of a well-brewed cup is worth something; and that something might be greater than that which you brew at home. Factor taste into the analysis and the $20k shrinks a bit.

It doesn't take a genius to realize that the more you're worth the more you have to lose. The stakes are higher as you get closer to reaching your financial goals. The truth is, though, even if you're just starting out and you've only accumulated a small amount, losing it means going back to start all over; but with the loss of valuable time. Umbrella insurance is your protection against having to start all over again.

As soon as you've begun to secure your financial future you need an umbrella insurance policy. Here's why: