Things that didn't make the list

and now I live there

Remember that show House Hunters where a couple would make a list of MUST HAVES and wait for a Realtor to show them ALL THE OPTIONS?

Haley needs to be within 10 minutes to the office and Bart wants to open a fitness center on the ground floor. They want no HOA but need a pool and park nearby for their Border Collie Bailey. Cafes in walking distance. Budget $90,000usd

In what world was this? Surely 20 years ago it wasn’t even that easy. I know, I know it’s reality TV but sometimes I’d get sucked into thinking it wasn’t scripted.

Today’s housing market, if you’re not an heiress to a tire conglomerate, is a bit more limited.

Previously a meth lab, has flood damage from last three hurricanes, gutted to studs, bring your creativity! Impossible to insure manufactured home with dirt lot, no pesky trees to care for near stinky toxic agricultural and/or industrial sites. In tornado alley and flood zone. Needs TLC and new roof. $347,000 cash only. Bring highest and best.

Twenty minutes later it’s off the market because Black Rock bought it. This has been my experience (with a hair of hyperbole, but not much) for SIX YEARS.

I’ve been buying and fixing up houses since I was 22. For GenX context, that was 1989. I bought my first bungalow in Clearwater, Florida with young but tidy credit and my first real job at a PR firm in Tampa right out of college. I wrote political press releases and put on Jazz concerts in a crack head park to promote the Town Square in Ybor City. Make it less dangerous feeling and more stroller chic sponsored by BMW friendly said our visionary but kinda deranged boss. See also, Sunday Farmers Markets. We were making towns livable and cleaning up. Today we’d likely get flogged for gentrifying. Oh you’re picking up litter? The audacity!

Seemed easy enough to find housing and a life. Decent job, saved for a down payment, good friends, lots of choices in housing, weekends of floor sanding and repainting. Could cycle to the beach and eat grouper sandwiches and have margaritas. Built a deck with the boyfriend. Had a nearby Home Depot and local lumber yard. Planted flowers. Cleaned screens. Sold, made modest profit, moved on to the next project.

I started a restaurant in the mid 90s outside of Atlanta and built that into a bigger restaurant and then a second. You could actually get a commercial lease as a nobody with a dream. No, really! After ten years I wanted to retire to a farm in the hills and do organics with chickens and herbs because I thought that sounded fun and relaxing. Took all my savings and went full force into that dream. Everything for the first 30 years of my life had worked out as expected. Work hard, save money, take moderate risk, sell and move up the ladder.

2007 creeped in with a dark cloud economically. I had sold the restaurants under the weight of not feeling flush enough to keep things rolling any more. Cost of goods, taxes on employees, changing laws, wine bars falling out of chic, boredom, stress, life changes, death in family, it happens. It was a good run and I’m not really cut out for decades long projects. Razor thin margins give you about three lousy weekends of slow service to erode all of your savings. Selling perishables and high end organic pastured beef and dairy, it makes me sweat a little just typing it. I got lucky and sold both restaurants to other people with a dream and put on my overalls to get to those chickens!

2008 saw the crash of the real estate bubble I had been riding for years. A modest craftsman with a long term tenant who was always late with rent in a neighborhood of foreclosures was “upside down” and the bank offered to “take it off my hands” in that deed in lieu of foreclosure act that sounded so appealing. I let it go after 5 years of renovating it. I still had the big county estate. I’ll finish this and move on.

After pouring barrels of cash into modernizing the country house, I started hosting weddings to pay for the kind of overhead a big property demands. I mean I was only mid 40s at this point I’m hardly rich enough to retire.

The weddings helped break even on the mortgage and utilities, but creating effortless Farm to Table Instagram worthy catered outdoor affairs for the 2012 trend of drinking out of Mason jars turned out to be WAY harder than running a fully staffed urban restaurant.

I’ve made a terrible mistake.

I should sell. Oh no! Upside down again? I either came to the closing table with $100,000 to get out of a $400,000 mortgage or get those fairy lights up in the trees again for the bridesmaids. Wedding catering sucks and I was already burnt on the restaurant biz. It’s not a great idea to go BACK to what you left on purpose. But there I was. Rapidly dwindling savings. Tanked mutual funds and conservative investments out the window. (I say this to relate to people feeling like the rug has been pulled from their “safe” investments, there’s no such thing)

The roof blew off in 2013 and I remember sitting there with gentle snow falling on my head in the living room and crying in front of my dogs and the Guatemalan gardener. Yes I had insurance and yes they canceled me after honoring the claim and it was really hard to find coverage after that. Thanks State Farm. (Noticing a trend?)

Other competing wedding venues popped up in the mountains and so I pivoted again. I moved into the garage apartment (the maid’s quarters back in the day Miss Hazel’s Room) and rented out the house on Airbnb. 90 minutes from Atlanta was great to me, but not a real hotbed of tourism. I started a compost business in the pool I filled in when that turned out to be an unsustainable nightmare. The utilities could exceed the mortgage payment some months. Sobering.

The landscaping and gardening on a 7 acre commercial (organic!) venture was mind boggling. I started sleeping with the tree service guy just to be practical. Keeping a kitchen garden looking photo worthy for brides and not a weedy, horn worm infested pile of last season’s tomatoes and squash bugs was keeping me up at night.

When I sold that big beautiful property after 14 years in April 2019, I lost money. Lots of it. But I felt a weight lift from my shoulders. I pulled equity out of the sale but figured I’d downsize or just rent a little place for myself and two aged terriers. Make some art, write my memoirs, go to breakfast. I sold *everything (which means I still had a mini van filled and roof racks with “treasure”) and drove to Florida. I grew up there but no longer have any family in the area, but thought I’d try the East Coast around New Smyrna Beach.

Sorry, too expensive.

Central Florida? West Coast? Northern Florida? Alabama? Mississippi? Louisiana? How about a rental. I drove hither and yon. Hotels, Airbnb Arkansas to Arizona, South Carolina and North. Kentucky? Texas??? I finally got so tired I rented a place in Oklahoma because it was easy and at $1000 the cheapest I’d seen that was livable and allowed pets. Covid of course landed in this time. And my newly created 8th career pivot of my middle aged life (web designer and small business consultant in the chiropractor/massage/wellness space) came to a halt.

Well now what the fuck.

I just drove to Mexico. I had no other plan. Now I’m accidentally in a place without an address in the middle of a Mexican desert with trash everywhere and lame sad stray dogs dumping trash cans to eat off of styrofoam to go plates from everyone’s dinner. It’s the exact opposite of what I would put on my House Hunters list. Most houses aren’t houses, but a series of tarps and pallet wood and as things improve or neighbors get savings or a bigger smuggling job, they build a wall or put a door on the house.

*This is poor interior Mexico, much of Mexico is beautiful and historic with great food and culture. It’s just not where I got stuck after a car wreck. But I won’t bore you with that. If you want to read how I got here in the first place and why I don’t just get out you can start here

Today the biggest news was that the tienda installed shelves near the ceiling with lights. Toilet paper haul with more than one brand. I may be able to find 2ply without added perfume, but baby steps. I haven’t seen a mega store, a Walmart, Soriana, HEB, Chedraui or Costco for 4 years. No prepared food. No frozen food. No decent steak cuts. No freaking blueberries. No goat cheese. No bakery. I’m still in the same flippers and Skechers slip ons and pull up yoga pants. Do I want new stuff? Sure!

I can’t get delivery unless I get it delivered to Hermosillo 4 hours away and pay someone to bring it in and even then, it’s 50/50. So I just don’t.

The savings has dwindled away after all these years on the road. Now I’m saving strange dogs with money I don’t have but used to spend on just the right Benjamin Moore paint color to go with the chaise lounge I got at that antique shop. My rent is cheap and my landlord cares not at all that I have spay clinic pop ups here and that I have a dozen or so dogs all the time.

I wasn’t always chill about this situation trust me. Something gave me the ick the other day when I saw Dave Portnoy of Barstool Sports yelling and screaming about how it was okay when he lost $7mil but now that it’s $20mil he’s really mad about tariffs. Imagine the level of tone deafness to complain about multi million dollar losses of investments that will bounce back in 2 days. That level of wealth makes you myopic if you don’t check in. Most days I’m still not jazzed about being “stuck” or broke but mostly I’m unbothered by the outside world.

I have a hummingbird who visits me many times a day in the backyard while I’m hanging laundry. I’ll bet Dave Portnoy doesn’t have a hummingbird.

I know things will change and even when you think you’re doing all the right things you can lose it all! but if you’re freaking out over lost money in investments or jobs or stuff you thought would be around forever, I’m here to tell you you’ll survive and maybe even find an opportunity in the chaos. Or you’ll just be poor. It’s not so bad. We’ll leave the light on for ya.

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