A little about me…

I’m currently 37 and live in the mid-west (Central Illinois). I work in the Advertising industry (Internet Strategy) but have been an entrepeneur in the past (sometimes successful, sometimes not).

I filed bankruptcy in 2000 and have been recovering financially ever since. I may post in more detail about this later but in short I had a business that was running out of money. My partner and I stopped taking pay in order to preserve capital and keep our employees working. After a year of this a company we were negotiating with to buy us decided it would be cheaper just to steal the business. They hired our employees and duplicated our product and business model. We eventually won two separate cases against them but the damage had been done. I had been living off of credit cards for over a year and needed to start over.

For several years I sort of gave up on retiring early or building a nest egg. Recently however I’ve decided it was time to get over it and get back on track. This blog is, I hope, going to be a part of that.

My wife and I married about 3 1/2 years ago. She is a lot smarter than me (phd in Electrical Engineering) and certainly more beautiful. We have no kids, and will not be having any. We do have horses, and a 1016 acre property to keep them on. My wife owns a horse breeding business (Holsteiners). In my limited experience I would have to say that horses are no way to make money, but we like them…

The image below is from our ‘wedding’ day (in quotes because we had actually had a civil ceremony a few months earlier, this day was more for family and friends.) We had everything on our property in Michigan, with our horses (we even owned the carriage at the time.) Total cost was around $7,000 including catering, the wedding cake, dresses/tuxes, a DJ, party tent etc. We had around 120 people show up and had a great time!