A bit of a rant today… I want to preface this with saying that I have no right to think I know how to solve the problems I’m about to carry on about on a national level, but as I look at this, I get more motivated to solve them for myself. Perhaps then I’ll be more willing to share opinions about what the nation should do. If I blame my personal situation on anyone else, I lose the power to do anything about it.

In 2012, my house was foreclosed and I was forced out. Now, for the story…

As I have been working on myself and my financial situation, wondering why it seems more difficult than it used to, I looked back over my life and can see very clearly why. Not theoretically, but in my own experience. Somehow we get so caught up in the stuff that pulls on our attention that we seem to forget the facts.

When I graduated from High School, minimum wage was $3.35 per hour; a meager $7,000 per year. I hadn’t made less than $4.00 since I was 13. My apartment in a new complex cost me $239 per month including some utilities. So, my nice 1 bedroom apartment was about 40% of minimum wage. Today, as my kids are going thru their early 20s, minimum wage is $7.25, about $15,000/year, and a comparable apartment is about $750 per month, about 60% of minimum wage.

When I bought my first house in 1992, I had been with the same company for a couple years and was doing really well at about $40,000 per year. The purchase price of a decent 2 bedroom house in a nice neighborhood; $39,900. The purchase price was 1 times my annual salary, and the payment, $380 per month, just over 10% of my salary. I bought and sold a few houses over the years, never really thinking about it in these kind of realistic terms. The house I lost in 2012: I bought this house in 2005, I was making about $90,000 per year, I shopped around and found a good deal on a decent house in a decent neighborhood, and paid $239,900. This translates to nearly 2.7 times my salary with a payment of $1700 per month, or 23% of my salary.

I was laid off from a job of over 5 years in July of 2009, after laying off nearly 100 employees. I applied for unemployment while I looked for a job but was denied because I had made $150 that month from a network marketing company. As I looked for work, If I found a job that was available, the wages for a job that was comparable to the job I had were about half of what the had been a year before, about $45,000. So now I’m in a house that cost 5 times my salary with a payment that is 45% of my income. I filed bankruptcy in 2010 and my mortgage company was shut down by the Feds for fraud, so somehow I go to stay in the house for a couple years without paying while they sorted that out. I felt ok with that given that the company that held my mortgage filed bankruptcy and was reimbursed for my mortgage anyway and I had spent $20,000 in upgrades to the house that I wouldn’t be able to recoup.

Bottom line, I don’t see things getting any easier and at this time, I’m glad I got into network marketing a few years ago so that now, as things continually get more difficult in the job market, I need a job less and less. At this point, My network marketing business that I work at very part-time, pays my mortgage every month, and by the end of this year, I wont need a job at all. In the midst of the mess, I’m excited about my future! Get yourself into a network marketing business that you like and stick with it. You don’t know all the future holds, so you might as well set yourself up to win no matter what!

I have been threatening to start a blog for a couple years now and I’ve come up with ideas for themes, a few blog post ideas, but have barely written a thing. I’ve kind of been in the space of: “I’ll get started when I really have something cool to share about.” And then, every time something cool comes up in my life that I want to share about, I go to: “Well, one blog post every couple months is hardly enough to keep anybody’s interest.” And I don’t write a word.

I finally decided to start writing for 30 minutes a day on whatever topic comes up for me and perhaps, at that rate, I’ll get a few blog posts banked and be able to start publishing soon and perhaps create a blog that will keep people’s attention.

I have been aspiring to be an author for several years now but writing a book takes more tenacity than even writing a blog (I think) and I have had similar results; a few basic outlines, a few chapters half-done, etc.

Most of my life I have been self-employed doing construction work. I have always had a dream of retiring early and being able to enjoy my older years without having to work. The problem is, I don’t know anyone in construction who has retired early. It seems like, while the money is better than working fast-food while you’re young enough to work, after about 20 years of construction, your body can’t handle it like it used to and you end up working fast food when you’d rather be retired because you couldn’t make enough money to put anything away.

The motivating factor behind writing for me is that I plan to make money with it in the next few years so I no longer have to beat my body up building houses. I’d rather work out my brain building dreams!

I have many facets to my life so I think I can write interesting stories and I may even have an occasional intriguing insight to share. This blog will be my story as I transform my life from construction guy to entrepreneur/author, with a variety of stories from my past and random thoughts and experiences from daily life. Enjoy!

Joe