Establishing a Baseline

Since this is going to be a recording of how well using the "law of attraction" works for me when I apply it in earnest, I think it is important to establish a baseline.  The biggest problem area of my life, the catalyst for taking action, and the area I will focus on the most is financial.  Therefore, I think it is important to establish a baseline of my financial fortunes to date - to see if there is a clear delineation from then to a period after the change.  This will be fairly long, and I will keep it to a description of events rather than a commentary on my feelings about money.  I will reserve that for other entries.

The general attitude about the way my financial life has manifested itself is that I have bad luck when it comes to money.  REALLY bad luck.

In my childhood, I was raised in a situation where my family didn't have much money (or at least it didn't seem like we did) while I was surrounded by upper-middle class families in Los Angeles.  Los Angeles is extremely materialistic at the best of times. This was the era of designer jeans and Guess fashion: where you stood socially had everything to do with the clothes you wore.  This put my family's financial status in a sort of hyper-focus for me.

I will make it clear that I don't believe our family was poor - but at the time I thought we were.  It is more accurate to say that money was not managed well and electirc bills, food, or clothing were not priorities after my parent's marriage fell apart.  Lots of things in our family were not right, but from a child's perspective, it looked a lot like money was the issue.  Juxtoposed to the privilege around me, the difference was highly perceptible.  When I was 16 I arrived home from school to find a foreclosure notice posted on our front door.  This confirmed for me that money was the problem for our family.

I didn't get family support to go to college, but was lucky enough to live in California where, at the time, an education at some of the best colleges and universities in the country was very affordable.  A few Pell Grants and Stafford student loans just barely kept me afloat along with working at least 20 hours a week and taking on student positions that supplemented room and board.  Still, I remember having extreme panic attacks while walking across campus not knowing how I was going to come up with the money I needed to pay my bills.  I remember breaking down once with a phone call to my mother begging her to help me with any money she could spare, explaining that I was really afraid I would have to drop out of college and didn't know where else to turn. I got an envelope in the mail and felt relief: until I opened it and found a check for $10.

I did ok duirng my early years - in grad school (fully funded by graduate assistantships) and in my first full time jobs because I was single and didn't need much. It wasn't long, however, that my long string of financial bad luck began.

I'll try make this brief; cut to the chase as my father always says:

I bought a condo in Chicago as an attempt at an investment and rented it out. Immediately the tenants started giving me grief stories and stopped paying rent. I hired a lawyer to evict them, and when I got to court the lawyer had already met the tenant and said he worked out a payment agreement. I had already tried to work with the tenant for months and knew that wouldn't work. After almost a year I finally got the tenant to leave, owing me $5,000 that I had to pay to cover the mortgage.

I lent $3,000 to a boyfriend who was visiting from abroad when he said he left all his travellers checks at home by accident. Right after the trip I found out he lied about that - and everything else. I never heard from him again.

I accepted a job with an American company in Ireland who promised to pay me in Irish pounds, but after the move they reneged and they only paid me the agreed upon amount in dollars, which was about 60% after the exchange rate of the day.

Another boyfriend who I left behind in Chicago stole $8,000 from me with an old check of mine he had in his possession from my American bank account. That was all the money I had, and was supposed to be used to service my debts (mostly student loans) while I lived abroad and worked for peanuts. I felt I had no recourse because I would have had to begin legal action against him while living in another country. I let it go and took the loss.

My husband and I bought and renovated a house in Ireland. I got offered a job back in America, so we secured a buyer before we left. While we waited for the deal to close, month after month, we paid the mortgage. The lawyers dragged their feet and hardly communicated with us. After 6 months we were told that they lost touch with the buyers and the deal fell through. We returned to Ireland to try and deal with the house, only to find the estate agent we hired hadn't done anything, and major road works were underway right next to our house blocking reasonable entrance to the road. On top of that, the pound had just changed over to the Euro, and for that year there was a sizable drop in the property market. We decided our only recourse was to give the house to the bank and cut our losses: about $14,000.

We bought a house in Vermont, where I was working. After 3 years we decided to move to Boston and start our own business. The property market was at its height in the summer of 2005 and we stood to net over $50,000 which we would use to invest in our business. We found buyers pretty quickly, but a fault was found in our deed, the buyer's agent freaked out, and the deal fell through. We decided to put more money in the house and market it again while we moved down to Boston. We had lots of interest and things looked good, but the deed spooked agents from even considering the property. We ended up with tenants who wanted to rent-to-own after they sold their house in Florida. Then hurricane Katrina hit and they couldn't sell their house. They left and we found another tenant who wanted to rent-to-own. Soon the housing market plummeted, and despite having struggled to make our mortgage payments all along, we again found ourselves with a beautiful house that was un-sellable.

After we held our business for about a year, we were approached multiple times to sell by a woman who thought the space was perfect for her newly bought franchise business.  My husband had worked 363 days that year, and I was unexpectedly pregnant with my fourth child. We decided that, although we weren't looking to sell, that this would be a good move and that after paying all our business debts, we could perhaps try and save our house in Vermont and I could start another business of my own. My husband was immediately offered two jobs in his field, so we decided to sell.

On the day my husband went to close the deal and pick up the check, the buyer used a contingency clause from her contract and reneged.  My husband had already started his new job, I was 2 weeks away from giving birth, we had sold the equipment she said she didn't want, and had sold out or stock of perishable product (this was a speciality food market). We had no choice but to try and work with her and hope she would come through. It went on for 6 months while we struggled to pay off our business debts and reach some sort of settlement. In the end, she paid only a tiny fraction of what she promised because she knew she had us over a barrel and could get away with it. It was devastating, and we still owed so much money.

A bunch of phone calls to lawyers to inquire about the possibilities of suing this buyer led me to consider bankruptcy after it was suggested to me over and over. They all said "you are the reason bankruptcy code was written....not for those who just max out all their credit cards on clothing and fun and then decide they can't pay.  You shouldn't feel like a criminal, you don't have many options."  We decided to file Chapter 13.  We continued to pay our mortgages and watch our properties sink further and further below the price we paid and the balance on our mortgages.

At this stage our story starts to sound like so many others in this day and age with underwater properties and a bad economy. We ended up moving abroad and taking a short sale on our Boston property and relinquishing the Vermont property to the bank (which remains unsold to this day - 5 years after we left).

During all these years, while we managed to buy property (we worked very hard to keep our credit up) and start a business, our incomes were low and we never ended one pay period with more than $50 (if that) before the next check came in.  Hardly a day went by that I didn't worry and fret over how we were going to make it.

I won't go on because I will write about all the other stuff in different entries.  I think it is important to write these things down so as I progress through my experiment, I can measure if these kinds of things happen less, and if my live receives more financial good fortune.