Last week my four-year-old daughter, Amelia, woke up and came running downstairs wanting to go outside and chase butterflies. I was already busy typing emails and taking work calls. However, the persistence of a little girl can be rather persuasive.

As I finally relented, it dawned on me that in a few weeks she wouldn’t be asking me to chase butterflies anymore. Instead, she would be starting pre-school. Amelia is our fourth child. Given that she is the baby of the family, I had seen this before… One minute they want to chase butterflies, the next they want to chase boys. Not wanting to miss the moment, I swooped up my little girl, and we went outside, and into the yard of our hobby farm to go hunting for butterflies.

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Picking things up from my previous post… We now found ourselves over $100,000 in debt due to our real estate investments. I had started a new job, but even though it was decent paying, it wasn’t enough. We had creditors constantly calling us because we couldn’t keep up on our bills. A couple of properties were slipping into foreclosure, and we were receiving notices from bank attorneys. In a somewhat archaic process, the bank attorneys post a legal notice on the front door of the property demanding payment, or else it will be sold on such and such date. In our case, they would be sold on the same King County courthouse steps, where only a short time ago, we had purchased properties. Things had come full circle. It was an excruciating season of waiting and the lowest point in my life.

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