When last we saw David, he had decided to sell The Money Pit, which he originally bought as a flip but then turned it into a rental. This due to his poor decision making on the rehab and his bad luck or inability to properly screen tenants as a property manager. With, really, nowhere else to turn, he approached me since I had a stake in the property. (Insert sinister, villianous laugh here!) Two years behind on his property taxes and going into foreclosure because he was unable to make the mortgage payments, he decided, grudgingly, to accept our terms. See what happens next in this episode of As the Money Pit Sinks.
I’m poking fun at the situation but, actually, this is a perfect example of what we do as flippers/investors. Every property and every situation is unique. There are probably as many reasons someone wants to move a property quickly as there are stars in the sky. Unfortunately, most people put themselves into this position thru their own fault. A lot of it is simply bad decision making and overspending. Basically, living beyond their means. David made a lot of poor decisions and then he wanted a sweetheart deal to get out of it. I’m willing to step in and help someone in this situation. But I’m also running a business and the goal of any business is to make a profit. If I can’t turn a profit, then I have no incentive to help so they are going to have to take the deal I offer them or go somewhere else. It may sound harsh, but it is fair. The deal I, or anyone, offer is based on our comfort level and risk tolerance. Maybe they can find someone that will offer them a better deal because they can, or are willing to, tolerate more risk. If so, more power to them
Under normal circumstances we probably would not have touched this deal. There was, as we like to say, not enough meat on the bone. The only reason we became involved was because of my $30,000 investment, which I stood to lose if we failed to act. That $30,000 second, with interest, was now worth north of $40,000. In order to make the numbers work for us, we had to renegotiate the loan, which meant I was negotiating with myself. First, I agreed to write off the $10,000 plus in interest, rolling the loan back to the original $30,000. I pointed out, to me, that it’s better to lose $10,000 in interest, money that I never really had, than the whole thing. I also dropped the interest rate to 4% from the original 10% but agreed to make monthly interest only payments of $100 deposited back into my pension. The principal was to be repaid when we sold the property.
As I mentioned before, the house was empty at the time of the purchase. But, during the escrow, the property manager, whom we released at the close in favor of self-management, found a new tenant with our approval. Seemed like a nice gal. Single mom with three small children and a seventeen-year-old daughter. She had a good job with PG&E, a job that had her traveling to Sacramento, two and sometimes three days a week. She had a brother that lived in the neighborhood, and he would come by to help with the kids when she was out of town. Having a paying tenant would seem to solve a lot of our problems. They were just beginning.
Lesson number four (lessons 1-3 can be found in Part 1) is to always, ALWAYS get your property inspected. I don’t care if you’re buying the house from your brother-in-law the priest, inspection is a must. We learned this the hard way. Since David was a friend, and he had shared a lot of the issues he had with the house, we assumed he was letting us in on ALL the problems. But, alas, when it comes to money people tend to put things like loyalty and friendship behind that dollar sign. At least with a professional inspection in hand you know what you’re getting into. We soon discovered why David wanted out.
We had replaced the roof and upgraded the kitchen countertops. Even replaced the dishwasher. Our guys were finishing the list of odds and ends when the tenant complained of a kind of musty, wet smell in the kitchen. That is never a good sign. The last thing you want to do is let water into the walls, baseboards, or foundation where it could develop into mold. One of the guys crawled under the house with his phone and took a video. In the video (which, unfortunately, I lost when I got my new phone) our guy told us to turn the water on in the kitchen and let it run. We watched in horror as the water ran out of the drainpipe and onto the ground. There was no sewer connection and he said it was like a swamp under there. In addition, he showed us a section of water pipe. Due to the hard water in Bakersfield the pipe was almost completely blocked with calcium deposits. You couldn’t even see daylight through it. We were also told that the gas lines were in bad shape as well. The water issue couldn’t wait, and we needed to cure it immediately. As it was December and we had property taxes due we opted to take care of the gas lines after the first of the year.
Our contractor connected the sewer lines and re-plumbed the entire house for a cool $13,000 that was not part of our original budget. As he was finishing, he smelled gas in the living room. He opened a hole in the wall and traced the smell to a stubbed off gas line that was completely rotted. He turned the gas off so he could replace the section of line but then had to call the gas company as only they can turn the gas back on, standard operating procedure. But, when the tecnician tested the system, it couldn’t hold pressure due to all the bad pipe. The inspector was pretty cool. Gas isn’t a high pressure system and, for testing purposes, has to hold pressure at well above the normal usage range. We could hold pressure at the lower end of the scale and above normal use pressure, just not the higher end requirement. We explained the situation; recent purchase, replacement of the roof, unexpected plumbing issues, etc. He agreed to turn the gas back on but under the condition that we got the gas lines replaced as soon as possible. Our contractor helped out by agreeing to replace the lines immediately for just the material cost and sending us the blll for the labor in January. All total we ended up spending an extra $17,000 re-plumbing the entire house, changing out the gas lines, and reconnecting the sewer line.
At this point we were thinking David had no knowledge of the plumbing issues. He had been in way over his head on this place from the start and wasn’t exactly the brightest bulb in the chandelier to begin with. Our tenant knew we had inherited a host of problems and, since we were fixing them as quickly as they occurred, she had been very understanding of our situation. Turns out, though, her mother knew the previous tenants and was able to put us in touch with them. They showed us a whole list of emails and texts sent to the property manager complaining about various problems, mostly plumbing related. For example, they complained about the damp smell in the kitchen. The manager sent someone out, who obviously didn’t bother to go under the house, and the tenants were told it was nothing to worry about. They contacted another plumber on their own and he refused to work there because he knew some of the history and David, the owner, wasn’t willing to put up the money to fix the problems properly. Turns out David knew exactly what was going on and simply didn’t disclose the issues in the sales contract, which is illegal. We considered taking him to court and went so far as to speak with a lawyer. That’s the great thing about having a partner whose wife works in a law office, free legal advice. That advice was to drop it. Even if we got a judgement, David didn’t have a means to repay us, much less cover our legal fees. In the end we chalked it up to an expensive learning experience, Lesson number 5!
And it wasn’t all bad. After the first of the year, we went to our bank to refinance the loan. Here’s a tip for you novices. If you try to refi the loan in less than six months, the bank will use the original purchase price, $102,000 in this case, as the value. If you wait a minimum of six months then they will re-appraise the property. In this case, we waited a bit longer due to ongoing repairs. We were hoping the house would appraise at about $155K so we were pleasantly surprised when the appraisal came in at $173K. This despite the fact the rehab was still incomplete. Just goes to demonstrate how badly David screwed this up by not fixing the obvious problems. With a 75% loan to value ratio, we were able to pull enough out to pay off our investor and recoup our out-of-pocket for the plumbing. The better news was that by the second quarter of 2018 we were showing a positive cash flow on a regular basis and, except for my second, we had none of our own money in the house.
Yes, things were indeed getting better, or so we thought. Then we started having tenant issues. It’s always something! By themselves nothing serious but, in retrospect, collectively, we are probably lucky things resolved themselves when they did and the way they did. Outwardly we had a good tenant. She put up with the work being done on the house without complaints, even when she had to stay with her mother for a couple of days because we were re-plumbing and had to shut off the water. She always paid her rent on time and often a few days early. But things started to take a turn during the re-plumbing back in November of 2017. By then she had been there for five months. She complained that the garbage disposal was making a funny noise. Upon checking, we discovered some screws had fallen into it and it was pretty much toast. We figured they had accidentally fallen in there from one of our crew and we replaced it. Shit happens. Subsequently we are almost certain her kids had thrown the screws in there. We came to this conclusion because a short time later one of the toilets backed up. When we sent our plumber out he found several small toys and a disposable diaper blocking the line. Because she had been understanding about all the construction, we paid for the repair this time. But we sat down with her and told her she needed to explain to her kids not to put that stuff in the toilet or the next time she’d have to pay the bill.
There was also the issue of how she maintained the house. A requirement of the lease was that she mow and water the lawn. She complained that, because she traveled for work, she didn’t have time to do the maintenance. Her brother was there more days than not. I’d met him and he was kind of quiet, but otherwise seemed like an overall nice guy, although pretty useless except for babysitting. Since she didn’t water the lawn of course it died but at least that meant mowing wasn’t an issue. No problem. We decided we would install an irrigation system on a timer and seed in a new lawn in the spring. We’d also hire a gardener and raise the rent accordingly when her lease was up.
There were also issues with the inside of the house, I mean besides her kids throwing toys and whatnot into every opening they could find. Being a landlord and making the rounds of our rental properties, I’ve seen the way people choose to live. I’m not a clean freak by any means and I expect a certain amount of clutter but sometimes it’s hard to believe people can live the way they do. Because of the ongoing repair work, I was at the Money Pit once or twice a week between July and December of 2017. After that less frequently, but still two or three times a month. Usually, there were dirty clothes and kid’s toys laying all over. That’s normal clutter that I can tolerate. But the kids liked to eat on the floor in front of the TV and there were half eaten sandwiches and other bits of food all over the floors. There were always dirty dishes stacked in the sink and the trash was overflowing. She had confided in me that the reason she moved from her last house was because of all the bugs. I diplomatically tried to explain that the bugs were a result of all the food and trash being left out. We spray twice a year for pests but if she doesn’t clean up, the bugs will just come back.
Then, in June of 2018, she said her kids were being bitten by something. I suspected bed bugs and brought in our pest guy to have a look. She said it was mostly happening in the family room where they watch television. My pest guy confirmed that the couch was infested with the critters. They had recently bought the couch at a yard sale, whereupon I explained she had to be careful when it came to buying used furniture, especially beds and couches, at yard sales. We were getting ready to spray anyway so I told her he could treat the room and we would cover the cost. But this treatment may or may not work if the bugs spread. To make sure they didn’t spread she needed to do a thorough cleaning and wash all the linens and clothes in scalding hot water to kill any eggs they may have laid. If this didn’t work and we had to do the whole house, she would have to pay the cost. Of course, this fell on deaf ears.
We treated the room and that seemed to solve the problem…for a little over a month. Six weeks later she calls to say both toilets are plugged. I told her I’d send a plumber out but if we found the kids had flushed toys and diapers again, she’d have to pay the bill. She was fine with that, and I sent a plumber. Sure enough, he found toys and other junk crammed into both toilets. I went by that weekend and told her what we had found and, since we had already paid the plumber, she could just include an extra $75 in the next rent check. She took that moment to mention that her oldest daughter was now being bitten in her bedroom, which was on the other side of the house. It appeared that the varmints had moved.
I made some calls the following week and found a highly recommended company that specialized in bed bugs. They would also work with the tenant, so she could pay the bill in monthly payments. I gave her the contact info and told her to talk to them and schedule something around her hours. About a week goes by and she calls to say her mom was having financial problems and she was going to move at the end of the next month to help her out. Right away I knew she was lying, especially after I got a phone call a few days later from someone doing a credit check for a house she wanted to rent in the neighborhood. She obviously didn’t want to pay for the bed bug problem. Unfortunately, seeing how the family lived, they were going to take the bed bugs with them, along with an assortment of other varmints. As I said earlier, it was probably fortunate for us that this ended when and how it did.
Now we had a vacancy as of September first. As any investor knows, this is the end of the selling season, especially once you factor in the time its would take us to clean the property up and get it ready to put on the market. Even so, for about ten minutes we considered finishing the rehab and selling the property. We ran the numbers and figured we needed at least $205K once we factored in all of our expenses to date. Since we had recently refinanced we were stuck with the $173,000 figure for at least a few more months. Even then, we were probably looking at $185K, maybe $190K actual value, well below our $205,000 requirement. So, we decided to rent it out again. Since it was vacant, we could at least fix some issues that we hadn’t been able to fix while we had a tenant. That should get us $1,250 and possibly $1,300 a month rent. But first, we had to treat it for bed bugs, and while I’m sure she took a lot of critters with her when she moved out, our tenant left some behind. We sprayed…twice. The only room in the house that had carpet was the family room, which was where the bedbug infested couch had been. We replaced that with tile and laid down new tile in the adjoining bathroom and kitchen. We also renovated that bathroom off the family room. To go with the new tile floor, we installed a new tub, new toilet, new vanity and light fixtures. The kitchen got new granite countertops; her kids having destroyed the previous one. The cupboards were in good shape, so they got thoroughly cleaned and we upgraded the hardware. Also replaced the stove and hood fan to match the new stainless-steel dishwasher we had installed back in 2017. We put in the irrigation system and seeded in a new lawn. We resurfaced the hardwood floors and put down a coat of polyurethane. We hadn’t intended on doing anything with the second bathroom, but our contractor had left the house to check on another job and, while he was gone, his crew mistakenly demoed the shower, so we got a new shower for free. As it turned out that was a good thing because we discovered the subfloor needed replacing. Finally, we finished with new baseboards and interior paint throughout. About the only thing we didn’t do was replace the windows…again. Since this was going back on the market as a rental, we decided to put them off until later since we probably weren’t going to sell the place for a year or two.
It was during this period that we discovered some of the secrets our tenant had been keeping from us. Our contractor knew the neighborhood and he had spent a lot more time at the property than we had. In talking to him he confirmed that her husband had been a gang member and had been shot dead by the police. She had told us he was killed by the police, but she maintained that it had been a case of mistaken identity. Knowing the area, we had kind of guessed it was something gang related so our guy just confirmed our suspicions. He also mentioned, in passing conversion, something about her seven kids. Whoa, she only had four kids. That was in the lease. Well, apparently, there were three more that she had done a good job of hiding. It seemed that whenever I called her to say I was going to come over, usually to fix something, she conveniently had to be in Sacramento that day and could I come by in a day or two when she was back home. Well, she was using that extra day to hide the extra three kids, probably with her mother, while I was there. My contractor also casually mentioned the TWO brothers. We had met one brother but didn’t know anything about a second brother. He said the one brother, the one we had met, was kind of quiet and unassuming. The other brother was the one that bore watching. He knew the look and would bet his fee the guy was a gang member. So she was hiding three kids and a brother, who was possibly a gang member.Our contractor also said that her brother had caused an issue with the neighbor next door. Of course, the next-door neighbor was our next stop.
We caught her as she was leaving for her job, in full uniform, as a correctional officer. We introduced ourselves and she told us that she had had issues with the previous owner. She had a female tenant renting a spare bedroom. When the previous owner had painted, her roommate had a brand-new truck parked in the adjacent driveway and, of course, the wind was blowing, and the truck got doused with the over spray. Then David wouldn’t reimburse her. No surprise there. Did I mention I haven’t seen or spoken to David in the five years since we bought the Money pit? And he lives on the same street! The neighbor had considered going to court and why she didn’t is a mystery unless, like us, she realized even if she got a judgement she’d probably never see a dime. Then we bought the Money Pit and added a new tenant. When her brother and his gang pals got a glimpse of her in uniform they began to verbally harass her at every opportunity. It got so bad that she felt concerned for her safety and considered selling the house. We told her we were sorry she had to go through that and if she had any problems in the future, she should call us immediately. As we were wrapping things up she said “l even have pictures from the day the SWAT team was here!” Pictures of the day the what was where?! She showed us pictures of the SWAT team using their battering ram on the side door. Our ever resourceful tenant had managed to fix the damage to the door frame, but we had seen the dent in the metal door. She told us that they dented it when they brought in the aforementioned bedbug infested couch. We still don’t know why SWAT was there and it’s probably better that we don’t know.
This is when karma finally stepped in. I’m a firm believer in the concept that if you do the right thing it will pay off in the long run. We had been doing everything right on this deal. We took care of the problems we knew about and corrected the additional issues as they occurred. We didn’t try to cut corners on the cost. We were nice to the neighbors. We played nice with the tenant, as we do with all our tenants, beyond what was necessary. We have found that by taking good care of our properties and keeping the tenants happy they tend to treat the property better and stay longer. That philosophy also helps to maintain market value. But in this case, despite all that we did, it seemed like for every two steps we took forward we would take three steps back. Then Kevin was contacted by Anita.
A little background here. Several years ago, Kevin, working with a different partner, rehabbed a house and turned it into a group home. If you are unfamiliar with the term, a group home is transitional housing. There is a huge homeless problem in this country, more so in California, and especially in Kern County. A group home provides temporary housing for guys coming out of jail, or rehab, or veterans that have fallen on hard times, or just regular guys living paycheck to paycheck and lost their job or had a major unexpected expense and couldn’t pay the rent. Group homes also provide housing for individuals with mental disabilities, such as ADD or autism. These guys are, for the most part, okay. But they have issues making it difficult for them to support themselves without supervision. These homes provide, not only a place for them to live, but meals as well, while they get their feet under them and can transition into their own place. Typically, there are two or three guys to a room, depending on the size of the bedroom, up to a maximum of eight to a house. These homes are highly regulated and if you operate one you must be licensed and comply with all sorts of city, county, and state regulations. You can also expect regular inspections. Kevin and his partner were real estate investors, and their business model really didn’t fit a group home. They eventually sold the house to a company whose business model was to manage group homes.
But Kevin has a big heart and liked the idea of giving back to community by providing a place for these people to go. He and his wife owned a triplex in another part of town and had turned it into a group home as well. The difference was, this time he worked with a local organization called the Flood Ministry. The Ministry was a non-profit organization working with several churches and ran group homes. Kevin and his wife simply acted as the landlords collecting rent and providing a venue, so business as usual. His main contact within the Flood Ministry was Anita, who was very passionate about what she was doing, something that impressed Kevin. It wasn’t long before Anita branched out and started running homes on her own while still maintaining her job with Flood. Kevin wanted to help her get started and to that end, turned his triplex over to her and, by all accounts, she did a good job with it.
This brings us to the reason why Anita contacted Kevin. They were both happy with the results of the triplex which was now operating at maximum capacity. She asked Kevin if he had another house available as a group home. She estimated with a second group home operating at full capacity she would be bringing in enough income to quit her job and work on this full-time. Of course, Kevin immediately thought of the Money Pit and suggested to me that we go with the group home business model. There are pluses and minuses. With eight guys sharing a house, even if it is a large house, there is a lot more wear and tear on the property. Since Kevin and I were only acting as landlords we didn’t have to get involved with the nuts and bolts of running the business. Anita was licensed and would handle all of that. Even so, the property was under a lot of scrutiny from the county and mental health department, and they could do an inspection at any time. As the owners, we had to maintain certain standards, although really not much more than the standards for an FHA loan when you sell a house. The good news for us was that the monthly rent we collected went from $1250 to $2000 a month, although we later lowered that to $1750 when COVID hit. Another good thing is that all the rent money was provided by the county so we always got the rent and really didn’t have to worry about it even during the eviction moratorium imposed due to COVID pandemic.
There is another downside, though, with what is known as the NIMBY’s as in Not In My Back Yard. Everyone will agree that there is a huge homeless problem in this country right now. In Bakersfield it has reached an epidemic proportion with the homeless population growing an astounding 38% in the last year alone. Most people also agree that the concept of a group home is a good idea, until you tell them you’re planning on putting one in their neighborhood. Honestly, I can see their point of view. If someone told me they were going to put a group home on my block I don’t think I would like the idea either. To that extent, we try to be good neighbors. These guys in the group homes are rated on scale of one to five I believe. Number 5 are guys who are coming out of prison, having done hard time, and are, generally, very hard to place. You make more money but have proportionally more headaches. We only accepted guys at the level 1 classification. These are gentlemen that might be coming out of drug rehab or are slightly autistic or have other learning disabilities. They are mentally challenged but not necessarily dangerous.
For a while, things were looking good. We were getting regular rent at about 60% more than what we would have expected if we had rented it out conventionally. Anita was pretty handy and took good care of the property, making the minor repairs at her expense, unless it was a major problem, in which case she would call us. She did complain that she wasn’t making enough profit to be able to quit her full-time job yet. She said if she had one more house, she would probably be able to run the group homes full time. Ignoring the pattern that was starting to form, we simply went out and bought another group home, this one large enough to accommodate eight people. But even then, she was still having financial issues. I had mentioned earlier that some people are good at managing money, and others are not. Anita definitely fell into later category. It has been postulated that if we took all of the money in this country divided it up evenly so everyone had an equal amount, within a couple of years the people that were rich would once more be rich, having invested the money and let it grow. The people that were poor would be poor again, having spent the money on useless items. There is a little more to it than that, but I have seen a lot of examples of this theory in action and I don’t think it is far from wrong.
Then Dick Wadd (not his real name but an accurate description), Anita’s husband, entered the picture and things started to go downhill in a hurry. I didn’t know much about DW, but Kevin seemed to know him, or had at least met him at one time or another. You see, when we first started working with Anita as our tenant, DW was in jail. I came to find out he was a felon, and was serving a stretch for violating his parole, in this case carrying a weapon. He was released a couple of months after we started working with Anita. I try to be open minded and give people the benefit of the doubt. DW seemed like a nice enough fellow, but then, that’s a skill set you learn in prison. Something just seemed a little bit shifty about him but, since he was married to Anita, it was a package deal. And Kevin kept saying he was okay, but then Kevin is a lot less suspicious than I am and generally tries to see the good in everyone, even when it isn’t there. One of the first things DW tried to do was renegotiate the deal we had made with Anita. He wanted us to assume some of the risk. Unfortunately, that’s not the way things work. We were not business partners with them, something DW didn’t seem to understand. We were their landlords. If you, for example, own a restaurant but rent the building it is located in, you have a landlord and pay him rent each month. If you have a bad month, it doesn’t mean you pay him less rent or, if you have a good month, it doesn’t mean he gets more rent. He gets the same rent month in and month out regardless of how your business does. This situation is no different. This was their business, and they were either going to sink or swim. Rent wasn’t on a sliding scale. Of course, we wanted them to do well because, if they didn’t, it would affect our ability to collect rent. And if they did do well, then great for them. It didn’t mean we were going to expect extra rent.
So, we shot that idea down and I think DW somehow took it personally. Anyway, several months went by. Anita and I were friends on Facebook and one day she put up a post asking everyone to pray for her husband. DW had taken up with a local hooker and had left Anita for the woman. Now, while I felt some compassion for Anita and her situation, I also didn’t think social media was a proper place to be airing her dirty laundry like this. Meanwhile, DW and the hooker decided to leave the state. I guess DW wanted to prove that he could support her so, before leaving, he robbed not one, not two, but three banks. They then headed north where the police were waiting for them at the Oregon border with a new set of matching bracelets. I covered this in more detail a few months ago in my blog “The Wide Weird World of Real Estate Investing”. If you want more about DW and his misadventures, then I encourage you to go back and read it.
Once he was out of the picture, we discovered that DW was in charge of collecting rents. Sometimes he received cash and sometimes a check. The checks were deposited into their bank account while the cash seemingly disappeared into his pocket. Which explained why Anita couldn’t make the rent all the time. This all came down at the end of 2020 and at this point we were considering selling the property. Anita begged us to give it another go. We told her if DW came back into the picture we were done, and she assured us that wouldn’t happen. With the three bank robberies AND being a felon, he’s probably in prison for a very, very long time anyway. Kevin even sat down with Anita, on more than one occasion, to help her set up a budget. I don’t know what she spent her money on, but she still struggled to pay rents, even after we reduced them by over $500 a month due to COVID. We spoke to some of the gentlemen she was putting up and were hearing a lot of complaints about inadequate food and other basic services she was required to provide. There was no way to substantiate any of this but generally, where there is smoke there is fire, and if what we were hearing was true she stood a good chance of losing her license. She was simply cutting corners. Per the theory, I’m convinced that if you gave this woman a million dollars, inside of three years she’d be broke. After a year there wasn’t a lot of improvement so we decided to sell the Money Pit. That was this past spring. Good thing we waited because, as you know, the market has really taken off these past eighteen months.
We closed escrow on May 31, and I know what you are asking: was it worth it? In the end, I would have to say yes. After totaling everything up, I figure we made a little over $60,000 in the five years that we owned the property, or about $10,000 a year. In addition, I picked up about $6000 in interest on the second loan. Considering what we started with, and the fact I stood to lose the entire $30,000 second if we hadn’t acted when we did, I’d say we did okay. Not great but we did make money on the deal. And really, the point here is this is a great example of the things that can go right and the things that can go wrong in any given deal. You are always going to have issues with the plumbing, or the electrical, or the roof, or termites, or vandalism, and I could go on. We had chances to bail on the property on a couple of occasions. We would have broken even, maybe. But we stuck it out. As long as you can keep your head above water, it will eventually turn around. Every time you make a mortgage payment, you are paying down principle and putting equity into the property. Even if you bought at the wrong time, say in 2008 just before the market collapsed and housing prices were at their peak, if you held onto the property and as long as you collected rent each month you would have recouped your investment had you sold the property in the last eighteen months. That’s because generally, home prices now are higher than they were when they peaked 2008. Sure, not much higher, but higher. And, hopefully, you didn’t pay market price. NEVER pay market price! Of course, if you had bought in 2009 or 2010 you would probably be really happy if you sold in the current market. As a rule, real estate is always going to trend up in value. Oh, there will be peaks and valleys along the way but, if you stay the course and hold onto it long enough, it will always pay off in the end. That’s it for this week. A bit long but a lot of good information, I think. Until next week, keep swinging for the fences.
