Quote:
Originally Posted by 4RE KLR
...It will interesting to watch this play out, but I for one would like to get out of this business once and for all. I have had it! 23 years is long enough I just do not want to fight this crap any longer.
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After the slump, it'll get better, even boom ...because there will be a shortage of housing again. I used to like to think of it, in simple terms, as so many hundred kids graduating each year, pairing up and buying/renting housing, one for each pair. A steady flow creating the irrevocable need that always
will be met. I still personally believe that nothing else is as satisfying as being self-employed when all is said and done.
If you've been doing this for 23 years, you probably just missed the catastrophy in '79 and the early '80's. There had always been an approximate off/on 7 year cycle before this ...but '79 took the cake. Because there had been concern for inflation, Carter took the controls off interest rates and they skyrocketed almost overnight. I was a small drywall/plaster/paint contractor with about 12 employees in Bismarck, about 30k population then. The Death Nell began to ring.
One of my jobs was 144 unit apartment complex that was nicely progressing as set of twelve 12's. That was a sizable project for this little hamlet. Almost all my single family business dryed up within 2 months. The 144 unit? They boarded up the rough frame-ups right in the middle of the project and I never went back to it for 2 years. All my help was gone, so I partnered up with a self-employed buddy and we split the earnings. My buddy had almost nothing except what I had.
The final blow was a simple move by my wife. We were rather destitute but all my bills were being paid on time in spite of extreme difficulty in some collections (banks get theirs first). The kids were drinking powdered milk at this point. She once brought up that we could cancel our business phone which cost about $50/mo at the time ...but I refused, saying that even one job in a month paid the yellow page ad back. Then one day I came home and the phone was cancelled. I had bid two jobs that day. I remember it so well.
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