My Rocky Road to Financial Freedom
It was January 2015. My restaurants were losing $10,000 a month, and I had nearly maxed out my $200,000 line of credit. I couldn’t use the business credit card at Starbucks because it was overdrawn. I was getting nasty letters from the IRS about penalties, interest, and liens.
I had three months left before I would run out of liquidity?that’s DEBT liquidity, not CASH! And if that were to happen, I could no longer pay my employees, which meant they would quit and I would have to shut down the store. And if that happened, the landlords would sue me for the remainder of my personally guaranteed lease. Then I would lose my house.
I had bet big on a pizza franchise to achieve the passive income dream, but it turned into a nightmare. And for what? I would have been better off staying with my secure job instead of quitting ten years earlier to follow a dream.
What kind of husband was I?
What kind of father?
What kind of provider?
~
It all started so innocently. My dad made a good living working for IBM his entire career. When we vacationed, we did it right.

Every winter, we would go skiing in Innsbruck, Austria. I’d be in ski school all day for two weeks, and I got pretty good at an early age. We’d go to Hawaii, the Bahamas, or Nova Scotia. Life was pretty good. But I don’t remember my dad much because he was working a lot. I remember that when I was in middle school in Germany, I barely saw him.
Like most people, I was taught to get good grades, and getting A’s came easy to me. I started off as a biology major in college, but I switched to computer science my sophomore year, because it wasn’t clear to me how I was going to make money. When I graduated in 1992, the job market was awful, so I decided to get my masters?also in computer science?at the College of William and Mary.
Getting a secure job that paid well was the logical next step. It was what my parents told me to do and what everybody else was doing. It would also allow me to continue seeing my girlfriend, who I had met a couple of years earlier.
I didn’t question it, and I continued to drift through life, doing whatever thing came my way. I became a computer programmer for a government contractor in Northern Virginia and then took a job with the new America Online web development team. It was 1995, and the Internet boom had begun. While AOL was pretty cool, it wasn’t nearly as exciting as what was going on in Silicon Valley.
And I wanted a piece of it.
During one of our happy hours, I was chatting with our head of marketing. She told me her husband was starting a software startup not far from the office.
I joined in January of 1997 as their first programmer 토토.

I was in the right place at the right time, and in 2001, the company went public and put a bunch of money in my pocket.
Life was pretty good?at first.
Four years later, I sat in my cubicle not getting much done. I had been at the same company for the past eight years. When I joined, it was an exciting startup, but by five years in, most of the FUN people had left. I hadn’t. Now it just felt like a job, and I loathed the office politics.
I also had a young daughter and son, and hated not being there for them during the day. I remember my daughter had a ballet recital, and she asked me if I would watch her. I told her that I was sorry, but I had a work function that evening. I remember the way her face dropped in disappointment.
I used to come home exhausted, with barely enough energy to help with dinner and the kids’ bedtime. I’d crash in front of the TV to decompress and then go to bed. On weekends, I ran errands and tried to recharge the batteries so I could do it all over again on Monday.
I felt like the years were passing me by, and I was missing my kids grow up. I was making good money, but I wasn’t able to spend time with my family. What I really wanted was control over my time. But I had to work to provide for my family. I couldn’t figure out how to get both.
Then in 2004, when I was thirty-three years old, I read the book Rich Dad Poor Dad, and it hit me like a ton of bricks. I thought, I’m such an idiot. It’s not how much you earn or have in the bank account?it’s about how much passive income you have.
I read the book in about a day, and it completely changed my entire financial outlook. Passive income was going to change my life. It would allow me to be financially free so that I didn’t have to work, and I could do whatever I wanted to do. It would allow me to provide for my family AND spend time with them.
I had found the solution to my problem.
However, lest you think I’m a genius, my solution to passive income was not real estate?it was a pizza franchise.