Warren Buffett is like the old commercial for E.F. Hutton. When he talks, people listen.

When he calls for higher taxes on the rich, they may agree or not. But he gets their attention.

When he warns that derivatives are weapons of financial mass destruction, they pay attention, briefly ... then forget all about it, until the derivatives blow up the economy a few years later.

And when he steps in to write a $5 billion check to Bank of America, as he did last month, he can single-handedly spark a rally and a change of sentiment toward the beleaguered bank -- and maybe even the economy.

It's no mystery why Mr. Buffett has this kind of clout. He has made a career of being right when the rest of Wall Street was being wrong. And he has amassed an estimated $50 billion fortune, all of it from investing, to prove it.

But this isn't like watching a sporting event. You don't just have to sit in the stands and gape at the exploits of others. You may not be able to build a $50 billion fortune, but there are plenty of ways you can be your own Warren Buffett.

No kidding. Mr. Buffett's wealth is a triumph of steady compounding over many years. Since the mid-1960s, his company, Berkshire Hathaway, has grown its book value per share by an average of about 20% a year -- or 16% a year after counting inflation.

Today, most credit cards charge that, or more -- and you're paying the interest with after-tax dollars. But millions of people continue to carry a balance each month. That means your lender is earning Buffett-style returns -- from you!

Does your employer offer to match the first dollars you pay into your 401(k) each year? Matching dollars offer you a 100% return on the money you put in -- even before counting the tax break or the investment returns.

Beat that, Mr. Buffett! His 20% doesn't even come close. Hard to believe, but many workers still pass this up.

You can get a fixed-rate, 30-year home loan with an interest rate of 4.1%. That's a deal. This summer a Berkshire Hathaway subsidiary borrowed $800 million for 30 years. The rate: around 5%.

Oil giant ConocoPhillips is trading at $67 a share. Mr. Buffett paid $70 a share for his $2 billion stake. He has admitted to making a blunder by loading up on this stock during the 2008 oil boom, and just before the stock-market crash. Still, he has held on to most of his position. Conoco today looks cheap at eight times forecastearnings for the next 12 months, with a near-4% dividend yield.

Mr. Buffett owns about 2% of French drug maker Sanofi, whose products include sleep aid Ambien. He paid the equivalent of $40 per American depositary receipt (the U.S.-traded shares of an overseas company). You can get them for $35. Sanofi trades at a cheap eight times likely earnings over the next 12 months, with a dividend yield of 3.6%.

Wells Fargo is Mr. Buffett's favorite bank. He has been loading up for years, and his confidence in the San Francisco-based financialinstitution proved justified when it withstood the financialcrisis far better than many of its big competitors. Among the results: The bank was able to buy up rival Wachovia for a song.

Mr. Buffett was adding to his Wells Fargo stake in the second quarter, when shares averaged about $28. Today, thanks to the summer market slump, they're at $24. That's just a little over the bank's book value, and cheap by historical measures.

Mr. Buffett has shaved his position in this maker of Chips Ahoy cookies, Cheez Whiz and Oscar Mayer lunch meats, but he still retains a stake of more than $3 billion. He paid an average of $33 a share, but that was several years ago. Today, you can get shares of Kraft Foods for $34. After accounting for inflation, you're paying less than Mr. Buffett did.

Kraft recently announced plans to split its North American grocery and global snacks businesses into two companies, in the hope of unlocking shareholder value. (Mr. Buffett supports the move.) This follows last year's costly takeover of U.K. candy company Cadbury, which has boosted Kraft's presence in fast-growing emerging markets.

Meanwhile, the company's dividend yield, at 3.4%, looks as tasty as Toblerone.

Minneapolis-based U.S. Bancorp, the country's sixth-largest bank by assets, is another financial stock Mr. Buffett likes. (His stake is valued at over $2 billion.) The bank has been recovering from the financialcrisis: Latest quarterly earnings jumped by a third, as the bank lent more and its charge-offs tumbled.

USB has started ramping up dividends this year and buying back stock. Mr. Buffett paid $31 a share for his stake. You can get shares for $22, a mere nine times forecast 12-month earnings.

Any time you can find a way to earn better than 20%, you're beating Mr. Buffett. OK, I'm being silly. Or am I?

An example: It will cost you $50 for an adapter to dump your landline and connect your phone to the Internet instead. Even if that saves you just $10 a year, that's 20%. (It will probably save you much more.) And money saved is both risk-free and exempt from taxes.

These sums are chickenfeed, you say? Save $10 a year, at 20%, and after 40 years you'd have $74,000. So maybe it's not so silly.

If you can't beat him, join him. The more affordable Berkshire Hathaway 'B' shares cost just $69 -- down from nearly $90 this spring and a peak of nearly $100 back in 2007. They're less than 15 times forecast 12-month earnings -- low by historical standards, and nearly as low as they were during the stock-market crash.