EPTMany Persons, One Man, a Dream
“More money more problems”
This blog is going to give you a glimpse into the path of broken dreams which I have walked throughout the years. We begin with a tale of blood, sweat, and tears.
The year was 2006 and I was 19 years of age. My Dad, in his mid-forties, had invested the savings from his life’s work into a big residential community project and had been working for a few years on it. With so much work performed, the beautiful condominium community in Central Florida he envisioned was coming near to the state where it would be opened to residents. Dad invested everything he had financially and to give from his lifetime of experience in business and residential home construction into the condo community.
Mostly complete now -- the land cleared, graded (the process of levelling the land is called grading), the roads paved with asphalt, sewers installed, and the buildings erected -- the community was in the end-stages before residents could arrive at their new homes. Every condo had been claimed in a pre-purchase plan.
I worked with my Dad, Uncle, and Sister to help put the final touches on the buildings. We developed the process and performed the hard work of producing these big, heavy concrete handrails. Twelve-foot long and 18 inches around with a solid bar of steel through the middle of ‘em. We mixed the concrete, shoveled it into molds, extracted the product and finished them with a staining agent (for color and preservation). We produced handrails, balusters (those vertical column which hold up a handrail), and decorative trimmings for the aforementioned buildings.
This was heavy work. My Sister and I were given the production task of moving hundreds of bags of concrete mix into the form of handrails and these other products that were to be affixed to the condominium buildings. We woke at 7AM ate a bit of food and went to work through the day for three months to produce the handrails, balusters, and trimmings for the project.
Of course, it was all going to be worth it once we completed the community and moved to close the deals on the 100% pre-sold condos. A pre-sold condo is one where a potential buyer submits for a credit check and signs a piece of paper that says they’ll buy when the job is complete. It all added up to a prospective several million dollar profit take for my Dad at the pinnacle of his 30 year building career.
My dad thought he’d be able to make his mortgage payments without having to dip into his kid’s college, inheritance, and his emergency savings.
Then the 2007-08 global financial crisis hit. We lost everything over the next couple years trying to financially float the condo community by paying on its interest-bearing debt. In the end, when Dad had sold every tool and heavy vehicle he had acquired in his career, we even lost the property -- and all we are left with from the time is a Bank holding an 11+ million dollar claim against us.
Best Regards,
RG
thanks for sharing
