My csa & childhood hangups skewed a lot of the what should've beens surrounding what I have done for a living all my life. As a child I was always fascinated by lights & electricity, I always heard that "he's gonna be an electrician" and I was like yeah I'd like that...
I hated being in school and zoned out from kindergarten on, I hated being around other kids who mirrored back at me everything I wasn't and didn't have, so I ended up dropping out of regular high school. I was going to a half day vo-tech school for electrical and continued going there and "graduated" from there. I figured that I didn't need a HS diploma for an electricians license so I'd be fine without it, but this has always been another of my not so proud moments in life choices. My Electrical instructor was such a cool guy, everyone respected him, I came to love him as a father figure and mentor. He arranged me to work for a former student who was wildly successful, I "felt" taken advantage of for being paid peanuts, being told what to do by other young guys with authority over me... I "didn't work out" and was fired at 17. Then I reached out to my old teacher and he set me up to work for his son who ended up being an alcoholic and druggie, as were the rest of the siblings, much to my shock. I ended up quitting after a couple of years, feeling that I was running the show and being paid peanuts while he'd pay his older bar fly buddies with no experience a lot more than me and me having to constantly make excuses for why the boss wasn't around to customers.
These two experiences made me give up the dream of being a licensed electrician, which was stupid in hindsight because I only needed to apprentice 4 years in total to go for my own license which would've let me start my own business. I already had over two years down and threw that all away... With that I started my own home improvement business, not being outgoing and without a big circle of friends and acquaintances is a hindrance to any business start up, especially if you don't have a big bank roll backing you up. I survived until the recession of 90, then I was forced to look for other work or another business. Towing, I knew a scumbag who was making a lot of money with his own tow truck, I figured if he could do it I sure can... I started working for a big towing outfit in town, I even bought my own tow truck to get ready for when I'd strike out on my own. I found out yes there is good money in it, but it is dangerous and you have to be heartless at times by taking money from old ladies and people really down on their luck, not to mention going to nasty accident scenes. I ended up selling the truck before ever starting a towing business, after three years I realized it wasn't for me.
I then went and got my commercial drivers license, I then took a temp job nights driving tractor trailers for Fedex, stayed on for less than a year. Then took a job for three years driving a roll-off dumpster truck picking up mostly construction & demo debris for a lot more money than Fedex. I then got a job driving a concrete mixer for a major company for two years.
These driving jobs were very blue collar and masculine dominated worlds that I found myself in with all my struggles. I faked my own masculinity and toughness, the good thing about those jobs were the fact that I was by myself so much in the trucks out on the road, a much needed break at times.
Having always hoped and dreamed for more despite all my issues I tried my hand at starting a restaurant from scratch, and I did. I put it all together. I figured that we had a certain amount of money that we could try/gamble with this venture... That ended up being a miscalculation of a major sort. It didn't last six months before I saw the writing on the wall and pulled the plug, but we ended up more than doubling my figured risk and it cost us having to sell our investment property that was my childhood two-family home to get out from the restaurant debt fallout. It wasn't a sentimental thing at the time selling that home, it was the punch in the gut of being such a failure that would trigger my acting out that had subsided years earlier.
I ended up going back to driving for the concrete company again, but out of a different much further away plant due to not wanting to have to eat so much crow for having failed and needing to come back.
I always knew real estate investing was a good thing to get into, even my father stumbled into owning that two-family home that we ended up buying from him when he retired. We bought some properties, rentals when we could often by borrowing close to 100% but made it work out with rents covering it all. I learned how to be a landlord, sure we took our lumps with some deadbeats early on. These properties I knew would be feathering my nest in my older age and perhaps even be a legacy to leave for my kids if we do it right.
I was blessed by a trait that runs through my mother's side of the family, I can do any construction trade be it carpentry, elect or plumbing well. I can also watch something be done once or twice and somehow have the nerve to try it myself successfully. This served me well when doing home improvements early on and especially as an investment property owner not having to pay anyone else for needed repairs or improvements, which is often the Achilles heel for most investors.
I ended up getting my real estates sales license to cut out the one of middlemen when buying or selling properties, I hate dealing with people in general and I especially hate dealing with incompetents, liars and half-asses which I found a lot of in dealing with agents. I also wanted to get into property development as in buying raw land, building a home and selling it for profit. I took the plunge with buying a property and built a house by myself part time over a couple years and sold it when done. The few family and friends I had showed it to were surprised that I could do this and that I even had the nerve to try it. It was a lot bigger of a gamble than the restaurant ever was and we had young kids now in the mix but the economy was good. I ended up building more new homes one at a times and making nice money and feeling pretty good about myself finally... Until 2009 when the the crash hit. I was just finishing my latest and biggest new home, a 5000 sq foot home on a couple acres in a nice area. We were now stuck with this new home unable to sell along with the commercial loan that was ticking coming due in
full in a few short months. I knew that we couldn't take a chance on renting it out either, I even tried to sell my current home and the market was dead, dead,dead. The banks even stopped giving out mortgages among the panic, even our own bank who we had a great relationship with at first refused to give us a new mortgage to payoff and close out the commercial loan, even with a lot of equity in the property and excellent credit, finally they relented and gave us a new mortgage that let us hold onto the new home. So we figured that the best thing to do was to move into the new home to preserve it as best we could till we'd be able to sell it later and hopefully find a tenant for our old house that we couldn't sell in these desperate times. We ended up finding decent tenants for our old home, thankfully but still had a lot of carrying costs beyond what we could handle. All around us I saw peers fellow contractors loose everything they had during all this, a lot of regular folks lost their homes too. Thankfully I had amassed some heavy equipment that I bought right (cheap) for cash in the good times and was able to sell in even in the worst of times for what I paid years earlier and this helped us tread water till things got better. In our personal recovery I was able to finagle picking up a couple more rental homes, foreclosures that needed a lot of fixing up. We still live in our (then new) estate size home which has been very nice for my wife & I coming from where we both come from. Being that I built it myself and that my wife's father (now gone) had worked on it makes it mean that much more to us.
I spend my days partially retired managing my properties, I put on a new roof this summer on one of the rental homes all by myself so it's not all play time, I'm still too cheap to pay anyone else to do these things
plus it saves & makes me more money. I missed the recent upswing in building new homes due to timing with family needs, and real estate is everything to do with timing. I hope to still build some more new homes some day soon.
I finally found my niche or groove with real estate in rentals and building, had I not been so locked up in my hangups I would've got here a whole lot sooner and even further along. As an adult other men's success, their assets, their "easy" masculinity would trigger the old csa haunts & drives, this was a very faulty childhood coping skill that kept me back in many ways. Despite that, it finally sunk in that I did survive and succeeded beyond what I originally hoped to be able to do as a teen coming out of school. I had quite a few big failures and they always seem to stick out the most. What I came to realize was to count all the many hidden successes & blessings in your life and then you'll realize that you are further than you think. I couldn't see the forest for the trees with all my successes and accomplishments and now I do and those old hangups are gone.