NEW YORKIt was around 10 am on a sun-drenched summer morning, and James Altucher, perhaps, the worlds least likely success guru, was packing his worldly possessions, about 15 items, into a small canvas carry-on bag.

If I were to die, my kids get this bag, Altucher said sardonically as he packed away his laptop, iPad, three sets of chinos, three t-shirts and a Ziploc bag filled with $4,000 worth of $2 bills (People always remember you if you tip with $2 bills, he said), and departed a friends loft.

A few months ago, the boyish 48-year-old let the lease expire on his Cold Spring, New York, apartment, and dumped or donated virtually everything he owned, more than 40 garbage bags of sheets, dishes, clothes, books, his college diploma, even childhood photo albums. Since then, hes been bouncing among friends apartments and Airbnb rentals.

Its not that he is down on his luck. Several of the 16 books he has written, including his 2013 personal-empowerment manifesto, Choose Yourself, continue to sell briskly. His weekly podcasts, The James Altucher Show, featuring interviews with notables as diverse as Ron Paul and Luther Campbell of 2 Live Crew and Question of the Day, with Stephen Dubner, are downloaded about 2 million times a month.

Altucher is simply practicing what he preaches. Over the last half-decade, this former tech entrepreneur, venture capitalist and financial pundit has reinvented himself as a gimlet-eyed self-help guru, preaching survival in an era when the American dreamthe gold-embossed college diploma, the corner office, the three-bedroom homeseems like a sham. So one by one, he has shed all of them.

I have ambition, he said, to have no ambition.

In the past 25 years, income has gone down for the 18- to 35-year-olds, student-loan debt is at an all-time high, Altucher said over a lunch of zucchini pancakes at a Russian restaurant in the Flatiron district. We had $3 trillion in bailout money, and income inequality got higher than ever. People feel like they were scammed.

While there is no shortage of anger and confusion about the supposed waning of the American dream, what makes Altucher stand out are his Cassandra-like conclusions.

College, he says, is a waste of money. Although he graduated from Cornell, Altucher argues that the college degree is becoming a costly luxury in a world where millennials feel like debt serfs and entry-level professional jobs are scarce.

In a 2012 self-published book, 40 Alternatives to College, he argued that young adults could travel the world, educate themselves online and start a business with the same $200,000 they may spend on college.

Investing the money with even a 5-percent return would offer greater financial benefit over the course of a lifetime, he wrote in a blog post.

Similarly, he believes homeownership is a rip-off foisted upon unwitting citizens by a $14-trillion mortgage industry.

Its a total scam, he said in an online interview. Nobody should put more than 5 percent to 10 percent of their portfolio, their assets, in any one investment. But when people buy a home, they go crazy. They put like 50 percent, 60 percent, 70 percent of their net worth into this one investment. Its illiquid, so when times are hard, you cant sell it.

And he think stocks are a racket. Its a fierce worldview that is rooted in Altuchers own roller-coaster life.

In the 1990s as a young Silicon Alley start-up whiz, Altucher made millions with a web-design company, Reset Inc., that counted Sony and Miramax as clients.

Soon, he and his wife at the time, Anne (they divorced in 2010), were living in a 5,000-square-foot loft in TriBeCa that he bought for $1.8 million and spent another $1 million renovating. He felt flush enough to take a helicopter to Atlantic City, New Jersey, on weekends to play poker.

The lavish lifestyle did not fill his emotional void. Nobody should feel sorry for me, he said. I was really stupid, but I thought I was dirt poor. I felt like I needed $100 million to be happy. So I just started investing in all these other companies, and they were just stupid companies. Zero of these investments worked out.

As his fortunes collapsed, he was forced to sell his apartment for a $1-million loss (it was after the attacks of September 11, 2001).

To reclaim his wealth, he set his sights on the stock market. He read more than a hundred books on investing, and eventually wrangled a job writing for James Cramers site, TheStreet and, later, The Financial Times. Before long, his trademark hairdo, which looks like carnival cotton candy spun from steel wool, was a familiar sight on CNBC.

But his fortunes crumbled once again during the financial crisis that began in 2008. The hedge fund he started ran out of gas, various start-ups withered, writing gigs dried up. With few options open, he decided to chronicle his failures on a personal blog, which he named Altucher Confidential.

I just said, Ive made every mistake in the book: Heres what they are, Altucher said. To Wall Street friends, he seemed like Howard Beale, the anchorman in Network who had a meltdown on-air.

Instead of touting the latest hot mutual fund, he wrote posts, like 10 Reasons You Should Never Own Stocks Again. (Reason No. 1: Youre not that good at it.) He confessed thoughts of suicide.

Financial people were like watching a train wreck in real time, Altucher said. I had friends I hadnt talked to since high school call me and say, Hey, are you OK?

He soon discovered a sizable audience of people whose own dreams had just gone down the sinkhole. They, too, were looking to claw their way out.

The No. 1 search phrase on Google that takes people to my blog is I want to die, Altucher said.

By writing candidly about his own triumphs and flameouts, Altucher shows readers how they can succeed despite their flaws, not because of a lack of flaws, said Tim Ferriss, author of the best-selling 4-Hour self-improvement series. This is hugely refreshing in a world of rah-rah positive-thinking gurus who are all forced smiles and high-fives.

It helped that Altucher, despite his biting views on topics like college, maintained a positive tone. I am an optimist, he said. Theres a great novel from the 1960s by Richard Faria called Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me. Basically, Ive been down on the floor so many times, I know now that I can always bounce back, and it gets faster each time.

His philosophy is, perhaps, most clearly articulated in Choose Yourself, which he summarized over lunch like this: If you dont choose the life you want to live, chances are, someone else is going to choose it for you. And the results are probably not going to be pretty.

His fans swear by him. One reader, Beck Power, recently wrote an essay on Medium about how he inspired her to ditch a frustrating job to start her own online travel business. I dance in my underwear, she wrote. I dont have panic attacks anymore.

A talk he gave at a London church last year drew about 1,000 people, and fans have organized Choose Yourself meetups in cities around the world. On LinkedIn, where he publishes original free essays, Altucher has more than 485,000 followers and is ranked the No. 4 influencer, after Bill Gates, Richard Branson and Mohamed A. El Erian, the financier and author.

Altucher, in fact, disputes that he is a guru in the first place. I am not a self-help guy at all, he said.

Advice is autobiography, he added. I only say what has worked for me, and then others can choose to try it or not.

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Why this self-help guru only owns 15 things - Business Mirror