A couple of years ago, I got a call from a private lender who was worried he was getting taken by a borrower.

The guy had borrowed money to buy several houses, but couldn't sell them. He lost his own place to live and moved into a flip he was renovating with a hard money loan. That violated his loan agreement.

I laid everything out for the lender and told him, “It seems like a lot of people have set this guy up for failure for their own profit.”

The lender didn't care. He wanted his money.

I hadn't heard anything since. This morning, I learned the borrower took his own life.

He wasn't some scam artist trying to rip people off. He was a guy trying to survive after buying into a dream sold to him by fake mentors, predatory lenders, and wholesalers who played the part of a friend while figuring out how much wealth they could extract from him.

They fed his ego, sold him the dream, and kept him moving forward until the wheels came off.

I've watched this happen at least a dozen times, with the same tragic result.

These people didn't make the final decision for this man, and I'm not going to pretend I know everything that led him there. But they helped build the circumstances around him. They put him in a room full of people looking for something to take, and when there was nothing left to extract, they walked away and left him to deal with the wreckage.

That's why I call out predatory behavior in this business. That's why I have a problem with mentors who sell confidence instead of competence, and people who profit from someone else's ignorance while pretending to be in their corner, acting like a faithful friend.

There isn't much money in calling that **** out. It doesn't win me friends in the right circles, either.

But I've never needed an audience to tell me I'm smart, and I've never needed someone else's ego to feed my own.

Because the people who tell you how great you're going to be are rarely the ones who stick around when you've lost everything.

And I'm not interested in helping people sell dreams they won't be around to answer for.

Please know this, no matter how bad it seems or how alone you feel, it's fixable only if you don't give up.
Please, don't give up.