Foreclosures Canada

Years before I got involved with real estate I knew I wanted to be an investor. Even as a little kid I knew somehow I wasn’t going to be working for a living at least not in the traditional sense. It was my Dad who first introduced me to the idea of having your money work for you instead of your back. This is kind of funny because he worked for a living his whole life but then he loved his job flying airplanes.

I first started wheeling and dealing at about the age of eight. It all started during the summer holidays just after I graduated from grade two. My family and I had just moved to Abbotsford BC from Edmonton and I was on the prowl for some sort of new adventure. The area we moved to was abundant with hills and I somehow got the notion that flying down these hills on some sort of wheeled device would probably be a lot of fun.

At some point during the summer I fell in love with the sportiest looking wagon you had ever seen. This was not your typically Red Flyer. This baby was bright yellow with red racing stripes, big mag tires, and it even had duel brakes.

This was the corvette of the wagon world.

There was only one problem. I was eight years old, broke, and my birthday wasn’t until December. So what was a kid to do …… I hit up my father for the money of course and as to be expected the answer was no. So I tried a different approach. I thought getting an early birthday present would solve my dilemma. It seemed like a completely logical idea at the time but he wouldn’t have anything to do with it either.

I did everything I could think of, I even asked to borrow the money. I thought having a loan secured against my future allowance would work. The fun now would be worth the pain of being broke for the next ten years.

Eventually my dad came up with an idea. He offered to pay for half of the wagon if I would pay for the other half. At first I thought this just brought us back to square one, I was eight years old, broke, and my employment options were rather limited.

He then explained to me his other idea.

His plan was….. I would start my own business and it would go something like this.

Dad would pay for the wagon and start me off with a cash loan of five dollars. I would then go around our neighbourhood, with my wagon in tow, and start knocking on doors. When I spoke with our neighbours I would offer to “buy” their empty beer bottles and pop bottles from them for half of the face value of the deposit. I would then drag my wagon load of empties down to the bottle depot and I would double my money.

Little did my dad know that this principle of “doubling up” was going to stick with me for a lifetime.

It worked like a charm, I was offering a service and I was getting paid well for it. In fact it worked so good I soon developed a niche.

I would only take beer bottles, and preferably dozens, because they stacked up in my little wagon the best. Six packs were awkward to handle and pop bottles were all different heights so it made it difficult to stack them up more than two cases high.

At the time when I started a dozen beer bottles had a deposit value of 60 cents and soon went to a dollar, I was in seventh heaven. On a good day I could do two trips to the bottle depot and I would make about $20 bucks. Not bad for an eight year old in 1973. I had my wagon paid for in no time and the rest is history ……

After graduating from high school I spent years traveling around the world working and hanging out in exotic places like Spain, Austria, and the Great Barrier Reef in Australia.

Shortly before moving to Alberta I was working for a high rise development company in Vancouver. I had worked for them for about 18 months and everything was going relatively well as far as jobs go. Until a dormant medical condition I have reared its ugly head.

In March of 1997, while at work, I suffered from a Grand Mal seizure. I was rushed to the hospital and was later diagnosed with epilepsy.

It was the beginning of some pretty drastic changes. If I had a different job it wouldn’t have been quite so bad but since I was the safety officer and the first aid attendant for the contruction of high rise apartment buildings, it didn’t look very good. My prospects for maintaining a drivers license were diminishing as well.

Under the laws of the Transportation Act of Canada the Motor Vehicle Board of British Columbia was allowed to revoke my drivers license. So of course they did and I got a swift introduction to the public transit system. Losing my drivers license put an end to my zipping around town in my brand new little red pickup truck and three months later my employer put an end to my construction career.

I had always wanted to be a real estate investor and I knew Alberta, with its booming economy and non-qualifying assumable mortgages, was the place to be. In fact I had been thinking about moving to Alberta for a year or so before I was fired. In fact I had already booked a return flight to Calgary, I wanted to come here for the weekend just to check things out a bit. I was going to leave on a Friday after work have a look around and then return home Sunday night.

I wound up getting fired on a Wednesday two days before I was set to leave for Calgary so the timing was rather convenient. Instead of just staying for two days I wound up staying ten. After about five days I decided I wanted to stay so I rented an apartment then flew back to Vancouver packed my bags and left for good.

I spent the next 6 - 8 weeks going around the city looking at houses and looking for a job. It was all rather tedious because I couldn’t drive and had to take public transportation everywhere. I didn’t have the stomach for sitting on a city transit bus anymore so I came up with an alternative mode of transportation.

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