In 2007 I listened to a voice in the world. It said, "You need more $$$! You don't want to take 30 years to pay off your house like your parents did. The end of the world will be before then. You might loose everything if you take that long!" So I went and got my real estate license. I was expecting number 5 and left the others in the care of a 12 year old neighbor girl 6 hours a day for a month that summer. Both my husband and I got caught up in the idea of owning several properties that would go up in value. By April 2008, we owned 4 properties and if we had sold all of them except one at that time, we would have already owned that one. But we wanted MORE. We were greety and it cost us. The economic downturn made it so our tenants lost jobs and couldn't pay the rent. We were too nice and trusting and let some stay up to 6 months without paying, while we tried to pay all the mortgages by ourselves(using credit cards). My husband was set on paying every bank back every dollar we owed, because we signed a paper that said we would, and he was going to be honest and upright at all costs. We borrowed more money to fix up and get rid of each house one by one, each time being left with our credit card debts to pay off on our own. We were able to escape foreclosures, and even shortsales until our very last property. The tenants had smoked meth in the home and we didn't have the money to clean it up, so we were forced to shortsale that last property in the spring of 2013. Our misery from this mistake lasted 6 years. At the end of the 6 years, we own nothing and are renters ourselves, but we have no debt. We managed to get ourselves back to ground zero. Do you think our children suffered at all during that time? Big time. Our focus was elsewhere, so the children were neglected, feel unloved, and misbehave terribly.
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