An Ordinary Life, An Extraordinary Life

Chapter Nineteen – An Anguishing Solution One day I was at one of our car lots with one of the paint techs whom I’ll call George. I was bewailing my lack of work. I made a statement that achieved legendary ironic repetition some months later when we were both in a completely different set of circumstances. I said,          “I just want to work.” That was the day George began to tell me about a previous job he had had as a dispatcher in the trucking industry. I had some misgivings, as the job description didn’t really seem to suit my personality. It sounded like a fast-paced, high stress, quick puzzle-solving skills environment. Those weren’t my forte but I was so desperate for something to make more money, it intrigued me. I asked George to make inquiries for me. In a bizarre turn of events, a short time later, George was asked to go help run a trucking company in Charlotte, North Carolina called Expedited Direct. The owner of the company was a guy who had start...

Another distraction from my problems was volleyball at church. They run an annual league and I had signed up for that year. It was another activity that helped keep my useless worry at bay (at least temporarily). But it was also there that some very real help arrived. I ran into the guy from my accountability group who had warned me against getting into real estate in the first place. His wife was playing volleyball and he had come to watch. He had heard about my misfortunes so I was chagrined to run into him. I said,    “So I guess you owe me an I told you so.” This guy works in a very well-paying profession but he is one of the most financially disciplined, generous people I know - and I’m sure I only know an inkling of it. What he said next revealed his magnanimity of spirit and soul. “Absolutely not, Stephen. We just want help you guys in any way that we can.” I had been able to sell a few of the lots out in the country but the bulk of the properties were going to end up i...

Back in the country, the house that we were trying to jack up in the middle wasn’t cooperating. The ground was too soft and they couldn’t get a solid place to hold it. I guess that’s why it was sagging in the first place. And that issue started a trickle of things that snowballed into an avalanche of problems that ended with everything falling apart. Part of the reason I had felt the confidence to get into real estate was because I had been doing really well in my dent job. A large, nationwide used car dealership had built a branch in our town and asked us to be their dent vendor until they could train their own guys. I didn’t want to do it all five days a week because it was putting all my eggs in one basket and if the basket broke…. I knew they were eventually going to train their own dent techs and that would leave me in the lurch. But the other Integrity guy didn’t want to do it at all. So I agreed to be the guy because it was lucrative.  Well the company had started to train t...

As my holdings grew, I began to ask myself why I was doing all this. It was exciting but time-consuming added to my regular job. Laura was still home schooling but as the kids were growing older, she was getting to subjects that were getting beyond her. I was already helping with the more advanced math but I felt it would be nice to be able to help more. I decided that my goal would be to get to a point to be able to quit my dent job for the real estate so I could stay home to help with the home schooling. I met another investor/property manager in North Carolina who helped me buy another couple of cheaper places that he managed for me. I did these without my partner, which meant I had to come up with the cash. Laura had really good credit and that got her really good deals from credit card companies.  There were a lot of 0% introductory offers so I decided to start working with that money. As they were only in her name, the debt wouldn’t count against me either. This arrangement f...

One day I started talking about real estate to one of the salesmen at one of the dealerships I went to in North Carolina. The dealership was not too far from Lake Gaston. Tommy lived near the lake and had some experience working with real estate. We started talking about opportunities that I might be able to take advantage of. He found out about a woman in a single-wide trailer who was having financial trouble and was going to lose it to the bank. He asked if I wanted to make an offer to keep it in good standing, pay it off when the bank approved the sale, then sell it at a profit. I made about $15,000 on that deal. Next up, he found out about a small modular home a dealership was trying to get off their lot for a advantageous price. Tommy found a lot near the lake I could buy where we could install the modular and sell. While that was happening, he found some other lots at Lake Gaston to buy at good values. I thought it would be good to buy those now before their values rose so that i...

The housing market continued to scorch. It was rare for a house to sit for sale for very long. One day I noticed that there was one in our neighborhood that seemed to be taking a while. I decided to check it out. As there are a lot of military in our area, they have to move every few years and can get under a time crunch to sell their houses. This was one such case. For reasons I never figured out, no one had made them an offer. So I did. It certainly wasn’t top price but if time was ticking, I could get them out from under it and with the way prices had risen they would certainly still make a profit. They accepted. I didn’t use a buyer’s agent. I just had my lawyer write up the contract and the seller’s agent did the rest. My partner on the other house also went in 50/50 with me again. With the price being so high, we wouldn’t have made any profit by flipping it so it would be another rental. We wanted to hold on to it anyway to make money from the rising prices. After some basic spru...

Chapter Eighteen –Rise and Fall I went out to that fire and proceeded to engage in what became the fateful conversation with a house builder from our church. As we discussed the housing market, he encouraged me to get involved in real estate. I already had a little experience as we were renting out the town home. Now I started looking around at the wider market. I also began devouring any real estate books I could get my hands on. I talked to my accountability group about the idea. Most of them were encouraging or neutral but there was one guy who warned me against it. He had watched his father fail at real estate investing and it had soured him on the whole arena. I listened to his advice and promptly…blew it off! Laura also had misgivings. She’s not really a risk-taker so it made her nervous. But because of that conversation by the fire, I believed God had sent me in this direction and because of that, I believed I was going to succeed. There were two options – flipping or holding. T...

That first vacation in the Outer Banks began a seven-year tradition. As the kids got bigger, we moved on to a six-bedroom house in the same neighborhood so the girls could split up into two rooms. I found different adventures to break up the week each year like jet-skiing and go-carting or a trip down to the southern-most island. We also started a mini-golf night tradition for the dads and kids. The ladies were only too happy to have a night to themselves. As the kids got too big for my sand pools, I started to take them out boogie boarding, until we eventually held boogie-boarding competitions with me as the judge. I tried to not show favoritism but my kids usually won. In the later years, everyone started getting into surfing. We would play various games on the beach and made teams to compete in relay races. One year, inspired by the Summer Olympics, we set up all the boogie and skim boards to create hurdles. Back at the house, we began to teach the older girls how to play strategy g...

We finally moved into our new house and just as we were getting settled in, we went on what was to become a vacation tradition. Just south of where we live, there is a string of barrier islands in North Carolina called the Outer Banks, which is a big vacation spot. For years we had been talking about getting together with some other families to rent a big house all together for a week. Our friend and pastor, Eric Hughes told us and our other good friends, the Waskos that, despite the fact that none of us had a whole lot of money, we should finally just go for it. We all agreed and I went to work. While Eric and Brian Wasko are the more visionary types, I am good at the details. I researched finding a house to rent at a price we could all manage. Both the Hughes’s and Waskos have four children so there were 17 of us all together, with 8 girls and 3 boys. The houses have a maximum occupancy so I had to find something with the right configuration of rooms and beds to handle all of us. I f...