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Some of my mistakes made and lessons
learned
I didn't get to
where I am today by not taking chances and making mistakes.
It's been said: Nobody has gotten ahead by not taking chances and I
believe that. After all, I hit bottom three times financially, only
to grow out of these experiences.
Here are SOME of the mistakes that I have made.
One of my
friends who had an RV repair business asked me to go in with him
into an RV Park. It would have showers, dump stations, bath rooms,
and places to eat and or watch TV. In fact all of the amenities of a
plush Hotel. But I didn't know what was an RV Park and was afraid to
go into it. I should of course have had more confidence in my friend
and after he died three years later, owned the whole thing through
an agreement with his wife. Of course, right know there is an RV
Park right where we were thinking and it is plush and successful. My
lesson from this is if there is some-one you can trust, have
confidence in that person. As a matter of fact I trusted him like a
brother. As far as the investment, do your home-work. In this case,
there were RV Parks all over the West, but none in Lake Havasu City
where I lived at the time. I could've been the prowled owner of an
RV Park till this day!!
I had a very
successful Dry Cleaning and Tuxedo Business in Hempstead Long
Island, New York. When my wife Nancy and I decided to move out West
so as to be more family oriented, after all I was working six and
half days per week and wasn't spending any time with my three sons.
Well after we
made up our minds to move to Arizona, we sold our home and business.
The individual that I sold my business to was not willing to work
long hours and the business languished. After the seventh check of
seventy two payments, actually seven years of payments all together
stopped.
If you take
back a mortgage with some-one that you don't know, use his home as
collateral in addition to your business and you'll make out no
matter what happens. If I had done that I would have been 100%
better off. We thought about moving back like every-one else but
Nancy told me if I would stay, she would stay. Four years later in
1978 we hit bottom financially. It was a terrible time for us and it
was a terrible time for Lake Havasu City at that time. When I was
returning from Bull Head City another small town across from
Laughlin, Nevada I saw a convoy of about twenty U-Hauls’s leaving
town. There was a saying going around at that time: LAST ONE OUT
TURN OFF THE LIGHTS.
If your city
has economic setbacks, move to another city that is better off. By
my going "out of town", to other cities that were each about one
hundred miles away, I managed to survive during those days because I
was selling Life Insurance, Health Insurance and by 1983, securities
in these other cities.
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