What lies behind us &
What lies before us
are tiny matters compared to
What lies within us.
Ton pretend to know when you do not know is a desease.
He who knows others is wise.
He who knows himself is enlightened.
The more you sweat, the
luckier you get.
to our beloved friend: Cheri Merz !!!!
Thanks, Spotlight Team, for this recognition! It's so very flattering to be nominated for something like this, and a real boost to the old ego, lol. I was born in Corpus Christi, Texas on November 20, 1948, the first of three children born to my parents. I was four when my brother was born; and I still remember getting to hold him as soon as he and my mother were home from the hospital. When I was eight, my sister joined us. We had a typical 1950's upbringing, which looking back seems idyllic compared to today's dangers for children.
My dad was entrepreneurial, so I got a taste of what self-employment was like from an early age. I was eight when he left full-time employment to start his own business. My allowance, a dime weekly, disappeared, lol. Of course, that was when a bottle of Coke (no cans) was only a nickel.
We moved to Moab, Utah when I was thirteen so that my dad and uncle could work together in my uncle's business. We moved into the walkout basement of the home my uncle owned. I remember the two families had great barbecues every Friday. I only found out years later that it was because my mother and my aunt would both be out of grocery money by Friday, and they had to pool their resources to put a meal on the table! Seems like I grew up learning what I needed to know to get by on very little money.
Even so, between my parents' good planning, the scholarships that I was awarded and the GI Bill (which at that time was available to the children of veterans), I managed to return to Texas for college. My grandparents lived in Austin and believe it or not, my grandfather had just graduated from the University of Texas the year before I arrived there. A few weeks before I was to arrive, he was shopping at the University bookstore the day Charles Whitman opened fire on his victims. Granddad was pinned-down behind the bookshelves with the other patrons for over an hour as the bullets flew.
The Vietnam War was in full swing at that time. I didn't get much studying done between being boy crazy, discovering folk music and trying to make sense of the war, Watergate, the King assassination and the rest of the crazy world of the late sixties. In a music appreciation class, I was selected to take part in someone's master's thesis study because of my pitch recognition. The man who would become my first husband was also selected from a different section of the class and we met during the study. When he left school to join the Navy, I wanted to get married right away, but my parents insisted I finish school first. So while my beau was flying off aircraft carriers, I was taking heavy loads of classes in order to graduate early. After three calendar years, a few months before my twenty-first birthday and only a couple of days after he returned to the States, we were married.
That marriage was to last just nine years. After he got out of the Navy we returned to Austin so that he could finish school. While there, his son from a previous marriage joined us. I was pregnant with our first child, but didn't yet know it, when we left Austin for my hometown right after his graduation. Both of our boys were born in Moab.
Our lives were relatively uneventful until my second son was just beginning to walk. I wasn't particularly happy, but able to tolerate my life. To this day, I don't know what precipitated the series of events that led to my divorce, and I don't particularly want to revisit them. Later we became good friends, but that was after time and distance had softened the hurts that we visited on each other.
Meanwhile, I met my Budd. We are complete opposites in many ways, but it's been obvious from the beginning that God intended us for each other. We married in 1979 and two years later almost to the day we brought twin girls into the world. Shortly after that, Budd adopted my two boys, and we were a whole family. We lived in Moab until the girls were three, and then the main industry in town died and everyone who had a marketable skill left town.
We wound up in the Hampton Roads area of Virginia, in Newport News just north of Norfolk. We were in Newport News for just under a year, then moved across the Chesapeake Bay to Gloucester. By this time, it was getting difficult to put shoes on the feet of four kids on only one income, even though I cooked everything from scratch, baked our own bread and sewed all our clothes. Some years later, I would observe that I wished I had never gone to work outside the home, because the kids suffered for it. But at the time it seemed to be the only reasonable choice.
I secured a job with the Historical Research department of Colonial Williamsburg. It was there that I first became enamoured of personal computers. Because most of the employees who were in similar positions were graduate students at William and Mary, we had several hours per week that were set aside to attend classes. I chose to get all the computer training I could, learning spreadsheet, word processing and database applications.
After a couple more years we moved again, this time to a suburb of Baltimore called Severna Park, in Maryland. Using my new computer applications expertise, I got a job with an engineering firm and then later with the IT department of a hospital in Washington DC. We thought we were settled there, until my dad had his first stroke and I realized there was no way to get from Maryland to Moab, Utah in a hurry. Fortunately he pulled through that time, but it made us realize that we were way too far from our families. We moved back to Utah when the opportunity presented itself—the company my husband worked for went under in a very dramatic way. They still owe us quite a bit of back pay that they took back out of our bank account after direct depositing it. Then, instead of declaring bankruptcy, they just disappeared.
It took us less than a couple of hours after learning of the bank fiasco to decide we had had it with the East Coast and were going home. A week later, my husband pulled out of the driveway in a moving van with the three youngest kids and our furniture. I farmed our oldest out with a friend and moved in with my aunt and uncle near Silver Springs. This way I could keep some money coming in to pay the bills while Budd looked for work in Grand Junction where his sisters lived at the time, or Pocatello where his brother lived. Where he found it was in Salt Lake City. I collected my oldest boy and drove out a month later. We've been here ever since. In fact, he's been in the same job ever since—sixteen years this month.
Our kids are all grown now. Three have families of their own, and the last one, one of our twin daughters, is engaged. In addition to all my other projects, I have a wedding for next July to help plan! We have four wonderful grandsons, ranging from three to eleven. We don't get to see them often enough and if I have any regrets about still being ambitious at this time of my life it would be that we can't just take off and go see the grandkids. But soon!
Over the years, we learned many hard financial lessons, but we did learn them. A couple of years ago we finally got the hardest one through our heads. That is that we are ultimately responsible for our own financial well-being. Not the government, not the boss, US! Budd has had two companies fold out from under him and the one he works for now nearly went under in the wake of 9-11. His income has shrunk by nearly 50% in terms of real buying power over the last eight years or so, starting even before that fateful September. When it was actually cut, in January of 2004, we finally decided to do something for ourselves. By that time I had my real estate broker's license and we had some tools to help eliminate our remaining consumer debt from a company that I still promote now (see my forum My Offers if you are interested in that).
Our dreams of real estate investing were rekindled. Over the past couple of years, we've put ourselves on the right track. The debt is gone, the real estate investing is in process, and I recently closed our home-based real estate company and opened a new one with some partners whose business will help me expand considerably. It means more time away from home, but it promises to afford us a nice retirement if I ever get to the point that I want to retire. Right now, that seems very remote, as I can't imagine what I'd do all day if I retired!
Meanwhile, I've made some friends on ALP who helped me greatly improve a web site that my grandfather's story inspired me to create. It's called
http://www.Never2Late4Success.com . There I promote my financial and self-improvement tools and write about my experiences. I hope to help people learn from my mistakes and also from my winning strategies. I have a couple of ebooks in my head, and as soon as I've supervised getting new real estate web sites up and running, I'll get busy finishing the books. Lucky for me it's never too late, because I have several years' worth of projects to keep me busy!
--
"Wherever you are, whatever your circumstances may be, whatever misfortune
you may have suffered, the music of your life has not gone. It's inside you -- if
you listen to it, you can play it." -- Nido Qubein
http://www.never2late4success.com
Cheri
and thank you for joining The Spotlight!
The Spotlight Gazette Team
1 comment:
Hello Cheri,
I'm so happy to welcome you here on my favourite place!
I wish you all the success you deserve.
With friendship,
Anamaria
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