How Did Rich Dad Poor Dad Impact My Life?

It was 1999 I was driving all night through the city of Belfast in Northern Ireland I was working as a self employed taxi driver in one of the largest Belfast Taxi Companies.

I collected a passenger we started talking and as I was very interested in property investing he told me you must read this life changing book you would love it.

It’s called Rich Dead Poor Dead, it seemed a little bit of a weird name but the guy was really excited about the book so it stuck in my head, it was logged in my brain. I need to buy this book sometime but of course like many things it went on the back burner as life always has a way of taking over if you let it.

I had just split up with my girlfriend a while ago she was too serious and her and the family where a bit too hoity toity for me. So I had sunk myself into working to bring in money and buy and invest in rental properties at the time. I had managed to have 3 properties so far and was wanting to continue to grow them.

As most successful people would tell you it isn’t all plain sailing on the road to success there are a lot of obstacles there, and I seemed to have a special detector system for finding them. In fact after a load of car disasters I remember one of the owners of the taxi firm I drove for asking me if I had a target on my car LOL.

Just another day in the property investment game – Property investing sounds great but really it isn’t really all it is cracked up to be with multiple properties often come multiple mortgages and keeping up with them all whilst getting the ocassional shitty tenants do not always go well together.

Luckily being young and single it allowed me to be pretty flexible I could move into any one of the houses at a few days notice, so when a tenant left one of my houses trashing the place and often stealing some of my belongings, I could leave the other house or apartment start fixing the trashed house and get the other one that I had been living in rented.

Luckily I bought all but one of my properties in great locations so as long as they where in nice condition I could normally get them rented out pretty quickly. I would work sometimes 80 or 90 hours a week to make sure I could keep up with my overdrafts, credit cards, bank fees and mortgage and loan payments.

Over the next couple of years a few crazy things happened to me

I had multiple tenants leave my houses at the same time
I had two houses trashed by tenants.
I had a so called friend colleague rent one of my houses refuse to leave threaten me with paramillitarys to burn my car and ended up paying him to vacate my house, which was a lot faster and cheaper than eviction.
I had two people who room shared in my house try to steal the rent that the government paid off me.
One of my tenants/room mates stole my £800 Mountain bike
I got burgled and my stereo games console silver tea set and cutlery that my grandpa was given for 50 years service in Harland And Wolf was stolen.
Someone dropped a brick from a bridge and dee street in Belfast and it smashed my front window.
Someone through a brick in the afternoon as I drove past Twinbrook it went through the back side window of my Mercedes hit the back seat (I was doing 70MPH) It bounced off the back seat skimmed past the side of my head and landed beside the taxi data head at the front of the car on the dashboard
I got hijacked at knifepoint from a reverent’s house in Ligoniel at 2am joyriders crashed their stolen car knocked the door at the reverent’s house he made them coffee and booked them a taxi lucky me.
My Mercedes went on fire on New Years day when I was driving down the road and burned out right in front of me.
A week later I bought a Vauxall Nova for £400 and it was stolen by a taxi firm owner that I worked for in Bangor and was found burned out on it’s roof.
I went to New York and they blew up the Twin Towers on the day I had originally been planning to visit them.

It was New Years day, my bank manager had cancelled my overdraft without my permission an overdraft that I had paid a fee for to have for a specific length of time, in a few days this overdraft cancellation lead to about £2000 in bank fees for bounced direct debits for mortgages loans multiple phone contracts etc.

I had worked my tail off over Christmas week and New Years eve to try to catch up with my now missing overdraft made about £1200 the last 5 days but I was sick I lost my voice and to add insult to injury when I woke up in the morning the oil had run out and the house was like an ice box.

I decided to go and visit my mother in Lisburn so left Bangor and about 5 mins into my journey I saw cars behind me and in front of me flashing their lights.

I looked out the back window and saw smoke coming out of the back of the car so I stopped the car and jumped out. I grabbed the fire extinguisher out of the front of the car opened the boot and flames came flying out, I turned on the fire extinguisher had the flames nearly out and the fire extinguisher ran out.

Within seconds the whole car started to go up in smoke and I watched as my beautiful metallic green Mercedes c250 Diesel taxi sign, taxi meter, taxi radio, leather jackets, keys for four houses and an envelope of money including my 5K sound system amps subs speakers and stereo burned like a big bonfire in front of me.

Lots of cars stopped to watch nobody offered me a bottle of water to extinguish the flames by the time the fire brigade came it was too late the only thing of the car that was not burned was the bonnet.

After the list of things that had happened to me above this put me over the edge I decided that moment that I was going away, to America or Australia anywhere to get away from all this crazy shit that had been happening to me.

Story of the Policeman who visited the house – Coming soon

I found an ad in the paper advertising Chefs wanted to work in New York on a summer camp so I applied was accepted and this is when my 4 months visit to America happened.

Meeting Buffalo Bill

I arrived at the bus station and was looking for someone semi sophisticated in a vehicle to collect me and take me to the camp, Thats when I saw Buffalo Bill, he looked a bit like Uncle Jessie from the Dukes Of Hazzard he had a rough redneck accent was driving a red pickup truck told me to throw my bags in the back and said to me where we are going there is no food so if you wanna eat you better get yourself a Mcdonalds so off I went into McDonalds ready to start living the American Dream.

The Summer camp Story – Coming Soon

After a couple of months in summer camp we got the day off and I decided to go to a shopping mall in Binghampton I went into a book store and saw a book by a financial advisor called Anthony Edelman he had lots of rich and famous clients and I thought this would be a great book to learn more about money and investing, one of my favourite topics.. 🙂 But as I lifted the Anthony Edelman Book I caught another book out of the corner of my eye it was called Rich Dad Poor Dad not Rich Dead Poor Dead like I had thought immediately I remembered back to 1999 when the guy in my taxi told me I should buy this book so I did, I put it on my American Express Card and away I went off into the sunset.

To Be Continued