Falling Apart

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 their own guys and I was moved from inside to out back. Their dent guys were terrible and slow at first so I still did well. But as they got better, I got less and less work. I had to start looking for other stuff, which is how I was able to wander around looking for houses too.

When the economy took a dive in 2008, the dent work started to dry up. When the dent work dried up, my financial footing got shaky. Suddenly I couldn’t refinance the two houses I had just bought with my partner’s money to pull his cash back out. I also couldn’t go through with the other house I was trying to buy in Petersburg and I lost my good faith deposit. It was all starting to unravel and I started to realize that I was going to be in some serious trouble.

Throughout the real estate investment time, we had also had the ongoing trouble of renters not making payments on time and having to kick people out. The property managers we had hired usually dealt with all that and we had had the where-with-all to weather those storms for the greater long-term investment. But when the economy turned south, multiple renters took off with no warning and I couldn’t keep up with the mortgages.

Then we stopped receiving anything from one of the property managers and couldn’t get in contact with him. We found out later that his company had fallen apart and he was keeping the rent money from our properties to help him live. I went out to his house in the country but it looked all but abandoned.

As the problems flew through my mind over and over, I went deeper and deeper into depression. I was having a hard time eating and sleeping. I even started to think that, somehow, with the way I was using the 0% credit cards, with some of the creative ways I was filling out applications and with the way I was getting behind on my mortgages, I was maybe even going to end up in jail.

Despite Laura’s misgivings, even disapproval about the real estate, she was generous in her forgiveness. We also had a tear-infused discussion with the kids to let them know what was going on. They knew it was really serious because they never saw me cry. It’s not that I try to be a stoic. I’m just generally an emotional fish.

I dreaded each day that came and didn’t get much relief at night. I welcomed anything that gave me any kind of distraction. One of those distractions was a Wii game called Tanks. I played it a lot. While I focused on that, all my problems didn’t constantly run through my mind, which didn’t help anything anyway.


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