Although I’ve come a long way, relatively speaking, I should be much closer to living life on my own terms than I am. An immature outlook, along with a complete disregard for an education or any kind of a game plan throughout my teens and twenties, resulted in my spending my entire thirties working in a food processing plant, in a back-breaking, mind-numbing, soul-crushing, no-future job.
If I hadn’t taken drastic steps during that low period of my life, I surely would have wound up on a disability pension or, at the very least, in some other dead-end job living under the poverty level, if not under a bridge. Had I not been as mentally strong as I was while implementing my plan to be able to leave that food production facility – and in the subsequent real estate and property management career challenges I faced – I can’t imagine where I would be now, or even if I would be now.
What kept me going through this phase of my life was that I at least had a plan; to economize where I could, saving as much as possible. Not to say it was easy. At every shift’s end, I could hear the rest of my co-workers planning to join a poker game, or go to a club or sports bar. Now even if they may not have been my first, second or third choice of things to do after work, it didn’t take a financial planner to know that if I did anything similar, I’d wind up living an uncertain existence, paycheck-to-paycheck. So, shift after shift, week after week, month after month and year after year, rather than spending my hard-earned money as soon as I earned it, I put it in the bank and went home.
Although I had no idea that this simple act of delayed gratification would result in my being where I am today, it at least provided me with a sense of direction – a sense that I was doing something positive – and with that, came a sense of optimism that kept me going.
My forties began with my using up the previous decade’s worth of savings on an ill-fated attempt to swim in the shark-invested world of commercial real estate, which came to an abrupt end some years into them. Luckily, I was able to pivot into property management just as my savings ran out.
The wealth of experience I gained as a property manager was parlayed into a series of preferable placements in the industry. The growth of the condominium sector has fortuitously seen me able to continue “putting the ‘man’ in ‘manager’”, while having fun doing so.
Looking back on my difficult passage from an immature, uneducated and incognizant individual without direction, I can appreciate the hazardous existence that awaits many others. I know they’re out there; those that are either in the same place as young men and women as I was at the beginning of my odyssey, or those that are still struggling as mature adults. In many cases, I’m pretty sure they have no idea what they are going to do and are either too proud to admit it, too immature to care, or too unaware to acknowledge it.
That’s where Make More Monie comes in. I’ve created it to be a hub for those striving to get ahead to come to for guidance and advice – counsel, if you will – from those that have successfully gone before them. It’s also a place where one and all can see in real time my own efforts to find financial freedom. Onward, and – with any luck at all – upward!