Know When to Hold 'em and Know When to Fold 'em

As many of you know, our greatest strengths can beome our greatest weaknesses!  Many of you on this distribution list worked with the late Tom Rand, a brilliant and genuinely nice man who helped Unum and many other companies develop their leadership talent.  In my Rand profile, as we called his evaluation of our leadership skills, Tom would point out that I was very persistent, never gave up, and did not know when to quit!  His point to me was that was not always a good thing. 

While persistency is one of the keys to being successful in my now humble opinion, the events of the last 4-5 years have driven home the fact that one of my greatest strengths, my not giving up, has been a weakness in what has been a dreary economic climate.  I refused to believe that the housing market in Paradise Valley, Arizona, would take more than 5 years to turn back in the right direction.  Up until about three months ago, all indications pointed to the fact that our house value was still greater than what we owed on the mortgage. 

We have battled and scratched and clawed to continue making the house payments on our house.  After all we had only borrowed 70% of the appraised value of our mountain-side lot and this was Paradise Valley,  a community that had never experienced anything resembling a turn down.   No way this mortgage meltdown and financial meltdown would send the values down more than 30%. 

I was wrong.  I am also painfully reminded of one of my favorite quotes that I use a lot.  John Wooden said, "It is what you learn after you know it all that counts."  Turns out I was not as smart as I thought I was when it came to real estate.  Perhaps I have to look in the mirror and question had I become arrogant?  Did my arrogance lead me to take steps to keep that mortgage current that make it so much more difficult and longer to recover?  We all know how dangerous arrogance can be.

I am happy to report that we have finally received an offer on our house.  It is 55% of the appraised value on the house in early 2007.  That appraised value was before we finished the remodel by the way.

I am grateful that we finally have an offer for the house and I am reminded of the Kenny Rogers song The Gambler, and the famous line of  "Know When to Hold 'em and Know When to Fold 'em!" Hindsight is 20/20 and hindsight says we should have folded a couple of years ago.  It is what it is so it is time for me to absorb the lesson and begin moving forward!  I am still sober and healthy which means I can and will come back strong.

As you can see on the right hand side of this blog. I have started a twitter page and I am just beginning to tweet!  You can sign up as a follower to receive the tweets by going to @dlanestephens.  Once again, humble beginnings.  For those of you who know I can become quite verbose, the good news is that tweets are limited to only 140 characters!

It is what you do everyday that counts! 

Lano