Home » Angels, Demons, Miracles and the like... » Miracles » New Shoes (A Miracle just because...)
| New Shoes [message #1597] |
Fri, 14 December 2012 12:25  |
Seeker
Messages: 244
Registered: June 2010
Location: Las Vegas
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Senior Member |
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I was inspired to share this by the post, "A Bottle of Medicine" by CalledtoServe.
My wife and I had invested our money into the Las Vegas Nevada Real Estate in the early 2000s. My wife is a Real Estate Nut and finally convinced me that investing in rental properties in the Las Vegas market would result in a 6%-9% return on investment caused by the steady climb of market prices averaged over the previous 10 years. In addition, we would have significant write offs against my earned income.
It was awesome. Using real estate loop holes were ended up with Tens of Thousands of dollars more write-offs than my earned income, so we lived without paying income taxes for years.
In addition, the market climbed faster than expected and within a few short years we owned 3.5 million in property, had a passive monthly income of between 4-8k (depending on vacancies and repair costs), and a net worth of around 1.5 million dollars in real estate equity. I hired a property manager, and retired. (Sounds like a dream huh!) It was nice for sure, but not all roses.
Anyway, 2 years into my early retirement, the market began to implode and prices began to fall. This wouldn't have been a problem because we were interested in the rental income more than the equity... Then the rental market started to drop and our loans started to rise... Houses that made $600 a month were now loosing $600 a month.
I was forced to go grudgingly back to work. I was blessed to get a good job which doubled my previous working income. We had $300-400k in the bank which along with my income we used save our small empire. It was gone far too quick... I can't count remember how many $30-$60k checks I wrote trying to fix holes in our sinking ship.
Less than a year after going back to work, we decided I needed to make more money and I trained my replacement and got a new job. I was making over $100k and almost all of it was going into our mortgages. There is a saying among investors, Assets feed you and liabilities eat you. Our assets had been eaten by our liabilities, and now our liabilities were trying to eat us too.
We moved out of the rental we were in to live in a travel trailer pulled by our truck. We used to live in a beautiful house around 3000sqft and now were in a box that was about 175sqft. We stayed in wal-mart parking lots and parked in quiet neighborhoods, moving around every day or two so not to wear out our welcome. (We wanted to know what it was like living in a trailor, so this wasn't a really big problem for us at the time. And I was still making over six figures, but all of it was going to debts.)
In addition, I will say, and my wife will vouch, that at the time, I was cheap like nobody you have ever know. I mean, if you told me someone was "Jewish" in reference to how tightly they held on to their money, I would have laughed and though, they have no idea or they would be using my name instead. I had discovered new levels of tight...
For example, my shoes. I had the same pair of shoes from my mission. I was still in my 20s, but my work/church/play shoes had holes all the way to my feet and I would just keep adding cardboard layers as inserts and kept on going. I could have bought new shoes, but why waste the money, right? LOL!
So, one night my wife and I parked our little trailer in a quiet neighborhood along side a 10+ foot tall hedge that spanned the length of 2 houses and their yards, Well over 200 feet. There was no sidewalk where we parked but there was a 2 foot section of grass between the curb of the road and the hedge.
It was wet and raining which is why I was finally talking about replacing my shoes. Cardboard and water doing mix well...
So my wife and I were talking about getting me some new shoes and had decided that we would get me a pair of work/church shoes and a pair of tennis shoes for play.
We went to bed that night. In the morning when went I stepped out of the Trailer to go to work, there set perfectly to the side of the trailer were 2 brand new sets of shoes. One was a pair of Sunday shoes Doc Martin style and the other were tennis shoes without laces. I looked all around and there was no sign of foot prints in the grass. We were too far from any of the houses for someone to have heard us talking the previous night. And we never mentioned the size of the shoe I needed, but these were a perfect fit. Except for the tennis shoes, they were a little large. Later I realized that they were self pumping tennis shoes which inflated as you walked and formed a custom fit based on the air pressure in the sides/top of the shoes. So they fit even better than the other shoes.
We tried to figure out who left them there for us, but nothing makes sense. Nobody would have even walked where we were parked and if they did, they would have gone around the trailer on the road because it would have been weird and uncomfortable to squeeze between the hedge and the trailer.
To this day we still don't know how it happened, but we greatly appreciated the new shoes.
It's been over 5 years now...and although I have had to replace the Sunday shoes, I still wear the tennis shoes all the time!
~ Seeker
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