Real Deal REInvestor Network

The owner had accepted my offer on his house. He told me it was a little better than the other guy’s—the other investor who had looked at the property the same time I did—and he wanted to work with a smaller company anyway (that would be mine. At one person—me—it couldn’t get any smaller).

Now, I just had a couple problems: 1. How was I going to pay for it, and 2. What was I going to do with it once I had it?

My marketing had outstripped my real estate knowledge (how I wish that was happening now!), and I had a house someone was willing to sell me for the price I’d offered. What to do? 

I started by seeking out an attorney. In litigious New York, I knew that was the first help I needed. 

A little panicked because I had to demonstrate my ability to the homeowner soon, I retained the first attorney I met; a woman in a small office who worked with her husband, ran a boutique real estate office, and assured me she knew all about real estate investing. I foolishly believed her, too. 

Instead of flipping the property for a quick $5,000 to $10,000 (which, had I understood wholesaling at the time, should have been my strategy—and which I could have done without an attorney), my attorney steered me into an outright purchase of the house, two mortgages and all. I was then persuaded to try and rehab it myself with the assistance of her two “handymen” (neither of whom spoke English). I have virtually no “handy” skills myself. 

Eventually we did manage significant improvements to the house, through many wild hand gestures, shouting, and scrawled Spanglish notes to one another. Now I just had to find a retail buyer…. But I’m getting ahead of myself. 

Yes, the house did sell finally, after a stint with a rent-to-own tenant, much marketing, and the realization that I never wanted to sell anything “for retail” again. 

Yet, for some reason that is still not entirely clear to me, when this same attorney asked if I wanted to get my real estate license and work as an agent for her, I agreed. 

Wait. Scratch that. I know why I said yes to her. Because I was scared. Rehabbing the house had drained what little financial resources my wife and I had; we were in debt; and I still felt I didn’t know the first thing about successful investing (nor did my attorney). 

Fast forward…

More than a year and a half later, having earned exactly $0 in commissions (save for about $600 I made renting an apartment), and having been shut out of the sole short sale I steadily worked on for this attorney, I walked away. 

I puttered around, read some books, tried to formulate some plans. Nothing much materialized. In retrospect, there was no reason anything much should have materialized. I was still waiting for something to happen. 

A few months passed; I grew increasingly fearful. I heard through the grapevine about a job working as a copy editor for a website. It was supposed to be part time, maybe 20 hours a week. I could work from home. We needed the money. 

One weekend while my wife and son were out of town, I went, interviewed, and got the job. I started within a few days. 

Soon, a few hours a day turned to eight hours a day. Then ten hours a day. One day—a Christmas Eve—I worked from nine in the morning until almost midnight. It wasn’t that the work was backbreaking, or difficult, or even all that stressful—although I was on a constant deadline. No, the job wasn’t those things. What it was, however, was something that has characterized every job I have ever held: It was soul sucking! I hated it. It took the “me” out of me, and over the course of the near year’s time I was there, my life spiraled downward. 

It was somewhere in there that I almost quit it all. I don’t know what exactly, but I know that a part of me just about gave up on myself completely. I almost gave up on my abilities, on my family, on my future, my entrepreneurial dreams—everything. I really almost lost it all. 

And it was there, when I was at the edge and looking down, that I finally did quit. I quit that miserable job as I had so many others. 

But it wouldn’t be until nearly a couple years later that I’d come to understand why I’d held onto that job so tightly in the face of my disintegrating life, when the thing that I really needed to let go was the easiest to release of all.