If you've missed one of the first chapters, you can catch up here
I've never really told any of this stuff publicly because it's extremely humiliating…
The missus was not happy about me putting more on the credit card.
And I felt so beat up – like a total failure chasing nothing more than a pipe dream..
I clearly remember the day I put up the auction – it was a duplex that needed a lot of work.
I was doing something pretty unique – I had set the price of the house, and was letting the people actually bid on the down payment.
The opening bid was $1.
The reason I did this was to attract as many people as possible and hoping it would result in a bidding war.
I kept refreshing the page to see the amount of hits and to see if we had any bids…
Within a couple of hours I had a bidder for the buck… (Woo Hoo)
Of course I still wasn't sold because – it was only a buck and the auction was a week from being over and I knew I couldn't celebrate until I had money in hand..
Before the end of the day – the bid had jumped to over $300
Every day that week I would wake up checking the auction and go to bed checking the auction.
I'd check it out multiple times a day –
All because I was struggling to make ends meet and just hoping and praying that this would all pan out.
Finally the last day of the auction was here – I was more excited than a kid on Christmas Eve…
The bid had skyrocketed to over $3K dollars and had over 7,000 hits with over 150 people following the auction.
The Dumb I Idea wasn't feeling so dumb at this point.
My wife sat in my lap at the computer – while continuously refreshing the page the last hour 30 seconds, 10 seconds, 5,4,3,2,1
I gazed at the computer in complete disbelief –
the auction was finally over and I had just seen the price go from $1K to $3K to over $7,000 when the auction finally closed!
The price doubled in the final hour.
So here's how it would play out.
The buyer now owed me the $7K and some change due within 7 days and they had to pay the remaining $45K in payments which would be enough to cover our monthly mortgage payment.
My wife hugged me and I couldn't stop smiling – I had that feeling of victory all over again.
I collected the $7K just before my payment to the mortgage company was late (literally it arrived 5 days before it was default.)
Once that deal was done, I started putting these houses up one by one, selling them off.
Each time, I was pulling in $3K or more as down payments.
This “dumb idea” literally kept me from going bankrupt and put me back in the game…
This proved 2 things to me..
1. What I thought was a dumb idea – turned out to be the best idea yet, one that was about to open so many doors. Now I'm less to judge before I test.
2. I knew if I could sell a bunch of dumpy house on ebay from Florence, Alabama, then I had to shift gears into the online world and focus more on my blog and books.
But somewhere along the way of buying and selling houses like a madman, I ran across a deal that seemed just to good to pass on – it was a failing local business.
And since I knew nothing about the business, I thought I could turn it all around.
And luckily we did.
Within 120 days that business was running, bringing in a nice cash flow every month that was paying for itself plus putting a little cash flow in our pocket.
Even though the cash flow was fair at the time – it still needed investments in inventory, paying off old debts, and regular maintenance because it was full of more drama than TNT had to offer.
And I hated every minute I spent there.
In the meantime, my blog had also started getting some love from the “Big G” aka Google.
There's a big problem though – I'm now staring at…
over $100,000 in credit card debt alone
It was from having to keep the 10 houses afloat, ordering inventory for the new business, and all the fixup costs from the real estate.
Plus, I was going through some of the biggest family chaos that would literally shake us to the core!
Watch for tomorrow's email / blog post titled – The Stare Down.
In the meantime – what's the most credit card debt you've personally had?
