Skip to content

Posted almost 4 years ago

Do you pick the red pill or the blue pill??

We have all had those moments in our life where we can definitively point to a fork in the road. We were faced with a choice to make that would alter the course of our life. I was faced with that choice in May 2019. At the time I had 20 units under contract waiting to close at a title company. The owner reneged on our agreement, my suspicion is because her son got involved and talked her out of the sale (maybe for his own gain?? Who knows?).

I was faced with a critical choice: 1). Drop the contract, write off all the hours I spent with due diligence, the weeks I spent presenting the deal to investors, the money I had spent on inspections, and return all of the raised capital plus some because of the interest owed on the balance or, 2). Pay a lawyer to take the case and try to settle the matter.

My choice was hard to make. The retainer for the lawyer was relatively small, but I knew that the whole process would cost thousands of dollars. 

Side note – I had no other income at the time.

There was no guarantee that anything would be resolved, for all I knew they had plenty of expendable money and they would fight this until the very end, in which case I would have to drop the case, drop the contract, pay the lawyer his fees (and likely go into debt doing so), return all of the money I had spent months raising, including interest payable, and start from scratch trying to find another deal worth raising capital for.

I can recall the conversation with the paralegal about the retainer. I was holding my business debit card in my hand acknowledging that what I was about to do was either going to change my life for the better, or make it much more difficult.  The weight of the card in my hands felt unaligned with the impact I knew it could have on my life.  I paid the retainer, and I did engage in a legal battle.

Spoiler alert…

I closed 5 of the 20 units, completed the BRRRR method, paid off everyone with plenty of excess, and the majority of my investors reinvested immediately with me! The few thousand dollars I paid in legal fees have since paid for themselves many, many times over and changed the course of my life.

It is very easy to look back and say absolutely I made the right choice. You may agree, seeing as by the end of May 2020 we will have purchased 11 units total. But I believe that had I posed the question to someone in a different situation that I was, I may have been called reckless or stupid even for considering taking the risk that I did.

Which fork is your fork?

At the end of the day, you are the only one who can make the hard choices. But what it boils down to is what choice you are willing to live with.  I could never have lived with myself if I had backed out, I would have wondered to the end of my days, "what if".  The point of this article was not to inspire reckless abandon of sound financial decision making, but rather to encourage those of us daring to make a change in our lives to step out of the comfort of predictability. I believed in my decision and would have stood by it no matter what the outcome would have been. I want to encourage anyone reading this who is ready to make a change in their life to be bold, believe in your decisions, and take a (calculated) gamble. Maybe the next fork in your road will lead to financial freedom!



Comments