Ruby’s Journal

Has a journal. Currently, in her journal are nothing but memories of what her friend from Portland are like.  So she doesn’t forget them.

The Hard Way

We find ourselves at a rockclimbing exhibit a few years ago.

My boy Jack, then 6 looks up at three paths.

The easy path with lots of handholds.  The hard path with few handholds and tricky angles.

rcw2

To Jack, it’s not a choice.  He tells the attendant “Our family rule is that we do everything the hard way.”

Too true.  He tries to go up the hard way – his first time rockclimbing.  Admirable, but foolhardy.

Our family. Same deal. A wind sprint from the couch.

We eloped and didn’t have the support and sendoff from the people that loved us.  This put us on a rocky path.

We bought real estate in the ghetto.  The place where the cap rates were high, but the tenants were even higher.  That was the overhead lesson.  (Thank you, Robert Kiyosaki).

I changed jobs every 2 years or so to chase away wanderlust.

We’re both stubborn people and we wanted justice at the expense of everything else. Someone had to be right, someone had to be wrong.

We didn’t take care of our health.  Good genetics kept us out of the hospital.

We sold all we owned and then packed everything we owned – everything – and put it in a minivan to get a change of scenery and we moved from Columbus to Portland.

Then, Heather was enrolled in an intense program that selects a select few and works them hard.

With a 3 and a 6 year old.

That’s the hard way.

That’s how we did things.  There’s more: taking on overhead, running a startup.  It was ugly and it was terrible.

Now, we’ve gotten Heather earning income.  We’ve gotten into a house that we love.  Everything – everything should be easier.

Current Projects & Status

Simplifilm:  This is my main revenue generating project.  We made some Q4, 2015 errors that we are paying mightily for right now.  Our current sprint lasts between now and April 30th.  The goal is to have clean books and financial integrity everywhere.

The Line Which Is Dotted:  This is my “Pixar.” It’s a to-be-launched project that will teach what I know.  Simplifilm has had a lot of success and we we’ve had over 400 clients.  I can teach the methods to get and keep clients.  This will have a podcast, Facebook Group.  I’ll be building it as a personal platform to teach sales and selling to anyone that needs to know.

Home

For 7 years, Heather has been going to school to be a Nurse Practitioner. She’s worked in an intense program while we’ve lived in Portland.  It was intense, financially it was tens of thousands of dollars (I don’t even know anymore).

It was relentless pressure for Heather. Every test was the end of the world.

It was pressure for me, financial failure meant Heather couldn’t go on.

This made it hard, we stared at the abyss. What kind of family arrangement do we want? Do we capitulate?  Break up the band?

Of the people in her (elite) program, during her program 40% of them didn’t leave the program with the partner they started with.  We came as close as humans can to that abyss.

I had to make choices at the business to generate cash today to pay the bills. That was pressure. We had to take now money out and take higher salaries than we needed, for both me and my partner. The personal cash needs constrained some of our options.

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That’s over.

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I have serious challenges to overcome in the business. But the conditions have never been more favorable to me.

I don’t have to earn much money from it, for now.

I work from home now – will never have the type of overhead I had before.

My life is set up to have some success. and I look forward to what’s to come.

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