Andrew Beal (born 1952) is a businessman from Lansing, Michigan who has made over 7 billion dollars in profits. Beal is a banker; owning Beal Financial , a bank with branches in California, Nevada and Beal's current residence state, Texas. Beal also owns Beal Aerospace, a company that has a contract with NASA.

Beal wanted to be a businessman since he was a teenager. During his years in high school, he would earn money by fixing televisions, working at carnival booths, and installing apartment alarms.

Still in high school, Beal and his friends began to relocate dislodged houses. Beal linked hydraulic jacks and his friends would raise the homes at night, then move them. One time, however, Beal was faced with a roadblock too large for him and his friends to overcome: one of the houses was destroyed by falling onto a road, stopping traffic for about one day, and Beal's project. This project had been approved by the city of Lansing's management.

Beal enrolled at Michigan State University, but he became bored with classes there and dropped out. His mother was dissapointed at first, but she would later cope with the fact that Beal had dropped out, because Beal bought a house for 6,500 dollars and started renting it for 119 dollars a month, which eventually led to his first net gain as a businessman. Beal was only 19 when he bought the house.

In 1981, Beal bought a project building in New Jersey, the Brick Towers . Beal became known for buying properties that no one else would want; he figured out that everything he bought could be turned into a profitable property.

His business strategy paid off, and, in 1988, he was able to open his first bank in Dallas. This was the year that he moved to Texas. At first called Resolution Trust , the tiny building was the first bank of the company that would later be renamed to "Beal Financial".

In 1989, Beal spent a weekend in San Antonio, buying houses that had been put on the market. The houses he bought, which were all on discount, made him a 15 percent profit. By the end of the year, his institution had opened six branches in California and undergone its name change.

During the 1990s, Beal tried to expand his bank's services to include international markets such as Russia and Mexico. These attempts failed, however, and Beal became uninterested in foreign expansion.

In 2000, Andrew Beal bought over 1 billion commercial loans from the SBA. Sticking to his business strategy, Beal made sure that these loans belonged to small businesses that were in economic trouble or unlikely places. These included loans made to businesses in Palau, and the United States Virgin Islands, where some local businesses had borrowed money from American institutions after Hurricane Hugo. The loans deal paid off greatly, thanks in part to Beal Bank's pursuing strategies and debt collectors, which have been critizized by people like Donna Christian-Christensen, the Virgin Islands congressional delegate who once sent the bank a letter asking for the bank to be gentler towards customers who still had not met with the payments agreed upon.

That year also, Beal became a gambler, as he became a common visitor to Las Vegas, to participate in poker games, especially the Texas hold em' style. Doyle Brunson, a world champion poker player, said that "It's almost as if he's playing with disdain for the value of money".

After the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, Beal once again went against what some call "common business sense", and he actually began buying airline bonds. He figured the airlines would recover from the tragedy; airline bond prices were very low at the time preceding the attacks, and Beal bought them expecting to sell them once they raised in price again.

Beal makes about 70 million dollars of profit a year from those bonds.

In 2004, the Beal Bank opened it's first Nevada branch. That year also, he received a call from Texas' bank regulator, who expressed his worries about Beal's gambling. Apparently, the state of Texas is worried that Beal's betting may lead his company into ruins, which would produce the effect of leaving a lot of customers without much money. Beal says that his days as a gambler are gone already.