How Rich People Respond to Financial Loss

[Gary Erdoglyan]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eka8XP_0wBw

How would you handle a $2,000 water bill? or an unsuspected issue. 

I would think as a newbie like myself i would be panicking!

Any specific advice? 

[Jon Holdman]

Not sure how that question relates to "how do rich people respond to financial loss"...

Every real estate project I've done has had unexpected issues.

First rental I bought was a pretty major remodeling project.  I'd hired HVAC guy, electrician and plumber and went to the city to pull a permit.   Nope, they said, you can only pull your own permits if you're living there.  Or have a general contractor license.  So, I ended up hiring a GC to pull the permits and supervise the project.  Added a couple of grand to the deal.

Last year a tenant calls and says "drain's clogged" (again.)  Sent a plumber over instead of the drain cleaner guy.  Calls a while later "hey Jon, hear that dripping?  Thats sewage coming out of the HOLE in your drain pipe!".   After fixing that and starting digging in the yard to tie the new pipe to the old drain line, he found that was collapsing, too.  $6200 later and that house has a brand new drain.

Doing a bath remodel on my own house, realized I wasn't confident about beams to replace the bearing walls I was removing.  Found a structural engineer.  $350 later I had a design for beams to support the ceiling.  Even though that was a cost, his solution was, overall, simpler and cheaper than what I would have done.  Though I had a hard time convincing myself when I was pounding additional floor joists in place with a sledgehammer while laying on my back in the crawlspace.

I have an investment in a mini-storage in Mobile AL that has retuned, maybe $1000 on an investment of $30K.  Since 2007.  My investment might be worth $10K at the moment.

I bought some ARBA stock not long before the dot com crash.  99% loss.

That's just a sampling.

Without risk, there's no reward.  Hopefully, on net, the winners outweigh the losers.