We just heard this morning about a wonderful colleague and friend of ours who died from an acute infection due to a medical misdiagnosis (yep, healthcare is going downhill folks). I wanted to share one of his recent stories of rugged individualism with you. He was a maker.

At 55, I was worth over 30 million dollars. I decided to deploy my capital in a number of real estate development deals. As the economy began to decline, these deals became unprofitable and at 64, I realized bankruptcy was the only option. I first thought I could do a chapter 11 and restructure these deals and have positive cash flow. But the economy was getting worse by the day-so I just gave it all up. At the tender age of 65, I was forced to live on $1500 a month and lost everything. This is where my story begins.
I thought about falling into despair, but I pulled out these notes I had written my children. I told them that you could do everything, overcome anything. Now, I would have to live up to my own words. It was not easy. I looked for real estate opportunities, and found a community that needed water rights. I located a bank-owned property that had the necessary water rights, but the bank had been burned by so many speculative offers, they were requiring $100k in earnest money. Despite living on 1500 a month, that wasn’t going to stop me.
I marched into the bank on a Friday, full of bravado, and told them I’d been a real estate developer for thirty years; I’d never put down more than 10k in earnest money, and I wasn’t going to start now. I proceeded to tell them my terms. I wanted a contract by next week if they wanted to deal with me. I then walked out of the bank in dramatic fashion. I figured I’d never hear from them.
On Tuesday, the papers came in from a distant city, to my surprise. I did not have 10k, I didn’t have 1k. So I called my son who had a secret clearance and asked him for 10k. He replied, “you’re bidding on a 14 million dollar property and you can’t scrape up 10 thousand dollars?!”
“yes. And overnight it!” Eventually, he agreed.
When I received his check, it was for $9,900. I called him up immediately. “What the heck?! I asked for ten thousand! Why is it less?” My son explained patiently that if he gave me 10k, he would have to report that transfer to the government. And given his secret clearance, this could cause all sorts of problems. “Surely, you’ve got a hundred bucks, Dad.”
“No I don’t!” I replied. I scraped up the 100 bucks, submitted my bid to the community who need the water, and waited. I won the contract, but the community said they knew me, and was sure I was making a killing off of this, so they wanted to just buy the water rights outright. I’m easy, I could do that.
So a year after going bankrupt and living on $1500 a month, I now owned 140 acres and a 8000 sq foot house.