I Was $750K in Debt. Here’s How I Ended Up in a Wilderness Cabin

A lot of people talk about self-reliance like it is an aesthetic. We talk about it like it is what you do when life punches you in the mouth and you still have to protect your family, pay your bills, and keep moving.

We take you through the full backstory, starting with growing up lower middle class around frequent layoffs, then working early jobs, buying land as a teenager, and learning fast how fragile money can be. The story gets heavier when a successful construction business grows, gets sued, expands, and then collides with the 2008 financial crisis. When customers stop paying and credit tightens, the result is the kind of business failure people rarely say out loud: relentless creditor calls, constant court stress, and $750,000 in personal debt tied to the company.

From there, the conversation turns into practical resilience and homesteading as a real plan. We break down the priorities that keep a family steady under pressure, then the actions that follow: cutting expenses to the bone, growing clean food, leasing acreage, fencing pasture, raising livestock, and rebuilding a life around skills and tangible assets. We also explain why redundancy matters, why “two is one and one is none” becomes a guiding rule, and why we keep working to eliminate weak spots, whether that is finances, food security, or infrastructure on the land.

If you are thinking about off-grid living, building a cabin, preparedness, self-sufficiency, or simply getting out from under stress and debt, this one is honest and useful. Subscribe, share this with someone who needs it, and leave a review. What is the first weak spot you want to fix in your own life?

Transcript

Back To The Cabin

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hi everybody, welcome back to the cabin. Been uploading, of course, on the YouTube channels, but I haven't uploaded a podcast in how long? Been uh well at least a year. Anyway, I am gonna start um uploading here again. I like doing podcasts. I like talking to interesting people. I learn a lot and I like to be able to share a lot with you a lot of the things that that are uh going on in my life, but especially the things that are going to maybe help you on your path to self-reliance. I've learned a lot over the last 10 years in particular. I've spent a lifetime, I think, moving this direction, but I think the last 10 years in particular have been especially educational for me. I've gained a lot of experience and I've made a lot of mistakes that I'm still learning from and I'm trying to correct those issues and trying to make my life and my homestead more resilient and more self-reliant. So I want to share a backstory, the my backstory, all the way back to I think the beginning. I've talked on here, especially on the podcast, a couple of times about my um present situation, how that works out, and what the confusion is for people between the two homesteads and the leaving of the last cabin. I've got a lot to share, and I want to continue to open up a little bit more about that because I think it's important to understand that backstory to understand where I am now and where we're headed, where I'm headed, but where the world's headed, and why I think it's more important than ever to be self-reliant. I'm just gonna go about my morning a little bit as I talk to you, get to uh get the fire going, get the kettle boiled and get some breakfast on. First thing I do when I wake up in the morning, which is around, well, it was just before four o'clock this morning. So what I'll do is get up and do some editing of footage from the day before. Unconventional as far as homesteading and uh self-reliant living is concerned, wilderness living, but that's just my life, as you know. Been sharing everything I've been doing essentially on video for the last uh 12 years now. It's 2006, and I started, I think, uploading in 2014 a little bit of the homesteading uh content and then canoeing and fishing and so on back in 2014, 2015. Now my quest for living in the wilderness uh full-time goes back well to my teens and probably even back to my preteens, really. If you if I think back to the books that I read and the way I um spent time in the woods. Uh anyway, let me get back to that. So back

Childhood Lessons From Being Broke

SPEAKER_00 2:25

in the early 70s, I was born in 1970, but in the uh 70s and 80s, I grew up in a small town about an hour north of Toronto. I have three sisters, two older and one younger. And uh we grew up lower middle class, I would say. My dad was in construction, he was a sheet metal worker uh for a roofing company and had worked there, ended up being 35 years uh down at Toronto, so he would make that commute every day. There's been a lot of uh ups and downs in construction over the years, of course. And back in those times, it wasn't like 70s, 80s, it wasn't um a high-paying job to begin with. It was decent, but not high-paying. Now, he was a union employee, so he made more money than the average sheet metal worker or construction worker at the time. But uh there's just a lot of layoffs, just inconsistent construction market. And um, yeah, a lot of layoffs, which meant months. Um, I'm not sure what the longest period is. It might have been even a year of unemployment, collecting unemployment insurance and trying to survive on that. My mother helped out, of course, um, raising us four kids, full-time job. So, what she did was rent a daycare out of the house. So I grew up with uh random daycare kids coming and going. And then when I was in my teens, she got a full-time job outside of the home, went to work in a doctor's office, and she uh continued to do that until she retired, actually. So lower middle class, hard to get ahead when you those frequent layoffs were coming. Um, I grew up, I would say, more poor than most of my peers. And um, but we made the best of it. My mom was really good at budgeting, so we always seemed to have enough, like our food wasn't great and uh didn't have a lot of possessions. Um, we were lucky to have that one pair of brand name shoes in our lifetime. In fact, most of our clothes were hand-me-downs or not even hand-me-downs, worse than that, came from my grandparents. My mom's father, my grandfather was a janitor at uh an elementary school in Toronto. And as the janitor, he had access to the lost and found. So after a certain amount of time when uh items of clothing weren't recovered from the lost and found, he would take them home and would have garbage bags full that we would go through, sort through, and and uh pick out what fit us. So often I was wearing clothes that actually had somebody else's name, which was common at the time, in the uh call written in the on the tag or um somewhere on the clothing item. Now, because of those times, that was really the first generation where the mother started going to work instead of staying home and taking care of the kids. So Generation X is my generation, and we just had a lot of free time, a lot of a lot of time that we were not coddled. We were able to go out and just explore and take care of ourselves for the most part and learn a lot of lessons the hard way. So that was a fun time to grow up. I I I missed that. I wish that for um our kids in the next generations to have that freedom and and be able to just experience and spend more time outside, really, is the main thing. Now,

School Struggles And First Paychecks

SPEAKER_00 5:31

I didn't do well in school. Uh I was typical guy, typical boy. I just was too restless to sit down and pay attention in school. I actually did well. Like I I could, you know, do very well on the test, but I just was so paralyzed by my fear of public speaking that I would not get up in front of a class to do any presentation. So anything that required that, like English classes, I actually just failed those. I just could not um just could not overcome that fear. So I did well on tests, like I said, and I did well on in subjects that just required you to use your head, like math, for example, or science I was good at, but English, history, things like that, I just did not excel at. So that really held me back. Um now for money, when I was about, I think 14 or 15, I got a job working at a gas station. I was just pumping gas, uh, doing oil changes and stuff like that. So five bucks an hour, I think, is what I made. And then I worked at a driving range, uh, driving a tractor, picking up golf balls and uh a couple other little odd jobs like that. It's a little bit of uh haying one in June in the summer. And then when I was 16, though, 16, 17, and 18 during the summers, I actually got a job with my dad, with the company that my dad worked for. So in the union, I was a construction uh roofing laborer, commercial roofing laborer. I actually worked on Maple Leaf Gardens uh one year. So we're tearing the roof off and putting a new roof on. So I was a construction laborer there. So I made really good money, like way better money than I had ever made and that anybody else, any of my friends were making, probably double what they were making. So I was able to save up a fair bit of that money. And

Buying Property Young And Losing It

SPEAKER_00 7:12

with help from my parents, I bought my first piece of property at 17, it was two acres on an island. And uh I loved that. I just spent all my weekends there. I'd have to get dropped off, of course. I didn't have a car at that point. So my parents would drop me off on a Friday evening and pick me up on a Sunday night, or I would get a ride some other way. I boat across to this island, built a little cabin there, not a log cabin, just a little stick frame cabin. And like I said, spent all my weekends there, mostly hunting and fishing and just exploring the the bush. Uh I fantasize about living there full time. So after grade 12, when I was 18, I ended up uh deciding not to go back to school. So it was four credits short because I failed English four times. So I you got for that reason, I just couldn't stand up in front of the class to do the presentation of that. I think it was 40% of the mark. So I just didn't want to continue with that. So I actually basically quit school. I tried a couple of odd jobs like um furniture making, pine and oak furniture making, um, installing fireplaces actually and chimney sweeping. And then my younger sister, who was living with her boyfriend down in Toronto at the time, she and he were couriers. So, and they were making pretty decent money. So my dad co-signed for a car for me. It was a little Ford Escort, brand new car. And I went to work couriering. So I was living with my parents at uh Indie Market, north of Toronto, drive down to Toronto, drive all day, and then drive home and put a ton of miles on that car. I think I put uh I think it was 40,000 miles uh per year, and I did that for a year and a half. Well, I got foolish. I was, you know, typical young and foolish guy and just spending too much money, probably mostly on outdoor gear, and I ended up stopping my insurance pay to payments. I just didn't renew, I didn't pay my insurance, so it lapsed. And about a week or two after I did that, I got broadsided. I was sitting at a stop sign, somebody came through the other direction, went through that stop sign, clipped another car, which spun into me and hit um broadsided me and wrote the car off. So, of course, the bank called in the loan. So that island property that I bought for $16,000. I sold it for $35,000 two years later, took some of that money, put the $15,000 down on the property, and then this accident happened. I had to pay off that loan, and I basically ended up with no money left. Well, around the same time, my sister and her boyfriend broke up and they stopped paying the mortgage, which meant that I had to take it over. So that was $150 a month, which to me at that time was a lot of money because I didn't have a job. I didn't have a steady job because I lost my car, I couldn't drive to a job. So it was just basically begging for rides or getting my parents to drop me off at different um uh jobs or getting picked up by you know employees, uh co-workers, and just nothing stable. So when I was 20 years old, so this would be 1990, my girlfriend dumped me, of course, and we'd been dating for three years since I was 17. Uh met her in high school. Um obviously she saw no future with me because I was pretty much a deadbeat at that point. I don't know, I just needed a change in my life. So I worked at a golf course for the summer and made pretty decent money there, and I was a good employee just to put work ethic in perspective. So I didn't have a car, so I was getting a ride with my friend, and there was three of us in the car going back and forth. It was about uh, I don't know, 15 miles maybe from our homes to the golf course. And well, one morning, I was sitting in the passenger seat, he goes to do a left-hand turn, and that guy uh coming this way went through the light and broadsided us, which was me. So I saw it coming actually. I kind of jumped off, uh, put my body and head off to the to the side towards the driver's side, and I didn't get injured, luckily, but it did ride his car off. So we actually rode our bikes. Uh, his name was Daryl, he ended up being my best man at my wedding. So we we would ride our bikes at uh four o'clock in the morning, maybe earlier than that, to get to this golf course because we were on uh water duty, so we had to water the golf course before it opened before people started arriving. Now, at the end of that summer, so early September, took the money, bought a golden retriever named Toby, a seven, seven-month-old golden retriever, bought uh cases of tuna, cases of rice, cases of shotgun shells, a new shotgun.

Trying To Live Off The Land

SPEAKER_00 11:56

And then my dad drove me up in his truck to the property and uh had an aluminum boat, fishing rods there, and I thought I'd live off the land for a little while, which was uh a real learning experience. It was more difficult than I thought. Fish and game were a little bit harder to come by than I thought they would be. But anyway, very hard times, but some of the best months of my life for sure. And it was only months because after three months, my parents worried about my mental health and the fact that I wasn't paying that small mortgage, $150 a month. They uh convinced me to come out of the bush and move down to Toronto, move in with my dad, who had my parents had just split up. So

Apprenticeship Years And Starting A Family

SPEAKER_00 12:33

he was living in an apartment down in Toronto closer to work. So they convinced me to start a sheet metal apprenticeship. So that's what I did. I moved in with him, and I lived there for 18 months with him in the city, which was absolute hell for me. But a year and a half later, we moved back in with my mother back in that small town that I grew up in, and I continued to commute to work down to Toronto. So, as much as I did not like working in the city, I was starting to make decent money. I was going to apprenticeship school, some trade school at night, working during the day. And then I met my wife when I was 23. At 24, I had an opportunity to take a job doing the same work, sheet metal worker for a commercial roofing company a couple of hours north of Toronto, which to me was much better than uh driving down to Toronto, even though the money was probably at least 40% less than what I was making in the city, and it was non-union. I was happy to do that. So my wife and I packed up and moved to this small house up north, $99,000 house in a small little village of $300. $99,000 was a deal at the time. If I had bought a house in Newmarket in this small town, uh, would have had to pay about $200,000 or more for the same type of house. So we had half an acre, spent all day working, and then at night improving that house. We put a lot of work into that. Like we were fanatical about just making improvements, making it more comfortable, growing gardens and built a little woodshed uh to work in. And we ended up buying a lab, Labrador Retriever, that had health issues. So we bought another one, which had other health issues. So we had three dogs at one point, including Toby, my golden retriever. And uh I was doing a lot of dog training actually and and uh waterfall fowl hunting with those dogs at the time. So when my wife was pregnant with our oldest daughter, I was 29. We sold that uh small house in a small village and moved to a slightly bigger village of 900 people and a slightly bigger home, again on half an acre. Things were very exciting at that time. That same year, after moving to the house, my wife gave birth to Aaron, our oldest daughter, two months later. And then I got promoted to field supervisor for the roofing company that I was working for, and then found out the reason I was promoted is that a month later, a couple months after I started that position, we were bought out by a big US roofing company, a massive $300 million company, and I was promoted to branch manager. Less money, actually, than what I was making, but a little bit more stable and working in the office instead of in the field, so a little easier on my body. So money was still tight. And then when we had our second daughter, Emily, in 2000, my wife went back to work after nine months and then uh had some issues with the babysitter. So we decided she was going to stop working and just be a full-time mom, which was the best decision we made for uh the family, but uh really a difficult financial decision. So we were pretty tight. Money was really tight at that time, too. Now, unfortunately, to cut expenses because every dime mattered to us at that point, that $150 a month mortgage was just a little bit too much for us to handle, plus the future carrying costs of that and uh a few hundred dollars of uh property, annual property taxes. We decided to sell that property and took a loss on it, actually. Sold it for about $30,000, which was around what um was owing on the mortgage. So we didn't get ahead, but we cut our monthly living expenses, which was, like I said, important to us at that time. I was doing well at work. I was getting promoted or at least getting raises. So we were I was making a little bit more money, but still didn't have much extra money. So we looked for a side hustle and I found an opportunity to rent some roofing equipment, purchase some roofing equipment and rent it out to other companies. So I did that, which meant we were starting to get ahead finally. And we were able to take the kids on vacations and you know, we get a little bit better vehicles, more reliable vehicles. And we started, you know, got caught in that trap and started dreaming of a bigger lifestyle. Luckily, we stayed in that home, never sold that home, but we were definitely starting to spend more money and look towards the future of maybe upgrading the house and I don't know, doing more foolish things like people do when they're climbing that corporate ladder and and uh you know living in that rat race.

Starting A Company And Taking Risks

SPEAKER_00 16:56

Well, by 2005, so I would have been 35 at that time, the company I was working for was trying to expand. And they wanted me to take basically half the country and expand into different cities, so open up new offices. So I was going to entail a lot more travel with not a lot more pay. And I thought, well, if I'm going to do that, I might as well start my own company and stay local and spend more time with my family and make at least as much money. So that's what I did in 2006. Started operating a new company that was in direct competition with my former employer, which they did not like, so they sued me for breach of contract or whatever, or non-competition. Now, it ended up being frivolous. The case was dropped a year and a half later, but in the meantime, I spent I think it was some at least $20,000 with lawyers uh defending myself. And it was pretty effective. It slowed us down for sure. Now, as soon as that lawsuit was over and I was free to pursue whatever customers I wanted and to hire whatever employees I wanted, we just started growing like crazy. In fact, I got nominated for one of the fastest growing companies in Canada. Now, in order to spread a little bit of the risk and to expand into new opportunities, I opened a couple of other spin-off companies, including Sheet Metal Company, still had that uh roofing equipment rental company, and we got into solar power, solar electricity installations on rooftops. Now

The 2008 Crash And Debt Spiral

SPEAKER_00 18:23

that was all great until it wasn't, which as you know, the financial crisis in 2008, our customers were impacted and payments got slower, credit dried up, so our customers were doing less work. So we tightened up, and then 2010 it really hit Canada, it really hit our customers hard, and we stopped getting paid on jobs, including some big, big jobs. And that put us out of business basically when a one of our vendors, one of our biggest material suppliers, a public company, they decided to start calling the customers and calling in the payments directly, which just halted our operations. And uh had now no money coming in, but all this debt owing to mostly these suppliers. So $750,000 of personal debt that I guaranteed of the $1 million that the company was in debt. Company's a million dollars in debt. I'm personally $750,000 in debt and just did not know what to do. So we went to a bankruptcy lawyer just to ask about you know what our options were. And he said construction companies and restaurants are are two of the worst businesses to get into for liability, but also for failures. And the fact that that debt carries with the owner of the company. In fact, what he said was most of the clients he dealt with uh for bankruptcies either ended up in divorce or in some cases suicide, where the owner of the company, the man is so his identity is so tied up in that business that he just can't handle the stress and the humility of losing that business. So we did struggle a little bit just with the creditor calls literally every day. I had to go to court so often, defending myself, making payment arrangements, whatever money that was coming in through selling some of the equipment from one of our other companies or small operations in one of the other companies. We were able to just string it along for a little while, but it was very stressful, of course, on me. My wife reflects back on it often and tells me how proud she was of how I dealt with that at the time. I didn't complain. I did not lie to the vendors. I just went into court and I said, you know, this is my situation. I have no money. And but any money I do have, um, you get 50% of that. And then any money that I did bring in, if I got a job, 50% of that would be garnished for life, essentially, because there's no way I was ever going to pay off $750,000, just uh collecting a salary and paying half of it to the creditors. And then what how do we live on the other half? So my wife was stressed, but she got to work cutting our life to the bone. She

Cutting Life To The Bone

SPEAKER_00 20:57

sold our cabin cruiser, the nice boat that we had, 35-foot boat. She sold her SUV at Buick Enclave and bought the cheapest car on the market, cheapest car to operate, which is a Volkswagen Jetta diesel stick shift. So we sat down together and made our priorities crystal clear. One was to keep our marriage alive and well. Two was to keep our kids in their childhood home, try to maintain some stability for them. Three was to take care of our health, including and especially eating clean, healthy food. Four, live beneath our means, and five, never get into debt again. So I continued to work hard for my employer during the day, but at night and on weekends, we decided just to get more self reliant.

Growing Food And Raising Livestock

SPEAKER_00 21:40

So I tore up the lawn in the backyard, planted a big vegetable garden. We approached a landowner just down the road from us in the small village, a 118 acre parcel. There was 18 acres that were clear around this old farmhouse, and he had bought the property just as an investment. So we approached him and he agreed to lease. For free, at least the 18 acres, as long as we took care of the property and help with the tenant in the house and so on, just managed the property. So on that acreage, I fenced in nine acres of it with electric fencing, and then nine acres, I planted grains to feed the animals. And I did that mostly by hand and then finally got an ATB to help me out. But mostly it was done just manually. So we raised Dexter cattle, Berkshire pigs. Um, in the backyard of our house, we had quail and laying hens, had meat chickens that I grew on the property. And during that time, even though it was extremely busy, I just started filming what I was doing. And I'd put the odd video up on YouTube. So in 2015, one of the companies that we had kind of been nursing along with a couple of partners, so I wasn't making any money off of it, but we were looking for new contracts and we were signing contracts for future jobs with customers. That

The Buyout That Reset Everything

SPEAKER_00 22:53

finally took off, finally got traction, and we started making a little bit of money, but mostly we were preparing this company for bigger opportunities. And I ended up having to make a decision. I was offered jobs and executive positions to stay on with some of the companies that wanted to buy us out. And I just turned those down and ended up taking a buyout. So my wife and I cashed in our shares and paid off the debt with the creditors. So I had to make deals with each and every one of them, paid them off and then paid off our house, and basically got back to zero. So we pretty much had zero savings, but at least we had a house and zero debt for the first time ever. So that was the end of a very stressful period in our lives. I was 46 years old when I started over. So rather than go back to the city and try to climb that corporate ladder again or work in the rat race, I decided just to try to find ways to make money doing what I love to do, even though it was not going to be as much money. So I started writing articles and making videos for online magazines like paddling magazines and for Ontario tourism. Now I was creating websites for people. We were selling landscape photos online. So we were starting to really feel like self-reliant lifestyle was necessary for us, was something that was rewarding. We felt more safe and secure doing that rather than getting a conventional job that I could lose at any time, like if discovered in the past.

Buying Land And Building A Cabin

SPEAKER_00 24:18

So we went looking for land and we found 20 acres for $50,000 a couple hours north of where we were living. So that was in the spring of 2017. So basically spent the next year and a half building the cabin that you all watched me build while my wife held down the fort with my teenage girls at home. You know, as you can imagine, the scarcity mindset was strong after seven brutal years. So I built everything as cheap and as tough as I possibly could with as little money as possible. So rather than invest in, you know, power equipment or machinery, I did everything by hand and I did most of it with hand tools. If our financial lives fell apart again, I wanted to be able to walk away and be able to survive or thrive somewhere else. Now, during this time, both of my girls matured and moved out of the house. So at least it was just my wife and I that we had to worry about now. So eventually my wife moved into the cabin with me. But if you've been watching the videos for a while, you know that other problems arose. So

Two Homesteads And The Pandemic Shift

SPEAKER_00 25:11

in 2019, we picked up eight and a half acres of raw forested land. Originally that was for hunting, but it ended up being the solution we needed and we were looking for. So my wife and I built a 1,400 square foot stone and wood house, but off-camera this time, something I did not share with you. It's basically a large cabin with modern amenities like you know electricity and running water from a drill well. Now, when the pandemic hit, my wife and I moved out of the cabin into this partially finished house, along with the girls who had to leave their situations. They were at school and schools were shut down, so they had to move somewhere. So we all moved into this half-finished house, showering out of a bucket for the first little while. The same bucket that we were using to shower up at the cabin. And I just kept working. I kept clearing land, growing food, working on the house, installing wood on the ceiling and the walls and the floor. Ended up building the workshop and then improving the garden and build a chicken coop. At the same time, I was still living part-time at the cabin and still working on and still making improvements. So as hard as everybody thought I was working on camera on the channel during that time, I was working twice as hard as you knew because I was working on two places at the same time, but two significant places, turning both places into fully functional homesteads, which most of that work was done, all the infrastructure work, all the building was done by myself alone, despite what some people think and say I had no physical help on any of the buildings. And uh my wife was busy just trying to make money in the background, too, and doing what she could to make sure that we're continuing to improve and increase our self-reliance. But most people don't know because they don't see her on camera, she works just as hard as I do, just in different ways. Now,

Why We Do Not Bring Helpers

SPEAKER_00 26:53

family friends and a lot of viewers always ask why just don't get help. Well, a couple of reasons. One is that we had 90 employees at the height of the business, and we just didn't want the liability of having anybody on our properties helping out. And the other thing is that, as you know, we've had privacy and security issues. So I just didn't want to disclose, especially here and our other homestead, I just did not want to disclose the location of those. Now, people that know that story because I've told it here before, know that we have the two homesteads that I'm continuing to work on. They just think we're either being too greedy or that it's foolish because it's just too much work.

Redundancy And Investing In Tangibles

SPEAKER_00 27:33

But telling you that scarcity mindset that I have controls my life. And I feel like redundancy is absolutely necessary at this point in my life, at least. It's the mantra basically that two is one and one is none, meaning if I have two and lose one, at least I still have one. Or if I only have one and I lose it, then I have none. I just don't want to be in that position again. The other thing is another mistake that I've made over the years is investing in the wrong things and losing money, losing quite a bit of money. And I just don't trust my money with anybody else. So anything extra we have, I'd rather have it invested in tangible assets like property, like buildings, and like equipment, things that I can sell if we get into a pinch again. And again, as you know, we had neighbor issues that finally forced us out of the old cabin. Wasn't an easy decision, but fortunately we're able to do that. We're able to sell that place and buy this hundred acres, which has been an absolute blessing. I love this place, I love this property, I love the solitude and the privacy we have here, and the fact that um it's so quiet and very unlikely to ever be developed in the area. And I've been very, very hard at work here. But again, I've been long working away here, building the cabin, building the outhouse, building the other infrastructure, and running the lumber mill, cutting trees down for the next projects and planning the next projects, basically still clearing, still building, still fixing weaknesses and still obsessing over self-reliance.

Self-Reliance Is Daily Work

SPEAKER_00 29:07

Look, I'm not telling you all of this to brag. I'm telling you because every single setback, every stupid mistake, every time life punched me in the mouth, I took responsibility. I didn't blame the economy, the banks, my old boss, my employees or bad luck. I looked in the mirror and said, This is on me. And then I worked harder. I protected my family, kept our home, kept my mind from breaking during years of court dates and relentless collection calls and all of the other challenges we all face in life. And I'm still not taking my foot off the pedal because I'm not convinced harder times aren't coming. So I keep identifying the weak spots and fixing them. That's what self-reliance really is. It's not romantic, it's not glamorous, it's working every day and doing what needs to be done for the people you love. Well, that's it.

You Are Not Behind If You Persist

SPEAKER_00 29:54

That's my story. Thanks for listening. That's a little bit more information, I think, than I've ever shared before. And the reason is not to brag, I'm not that type of person. I really wanted to make the point that I'm not an exceptional man. So I think I've accomplished a lot, especially over the last 10 years. And I feel like if one man can do this, one unexceptional man can do this, then if you set your mind to it, you can do just about anything. So if you're out there struggling with something similar to what I went through, either financial debt or some other stress, family, health, whatever it is, I think it's important just to realize that you can work your way through most things. Um, I'm not, like I said, exceptional. I'm not more intelligent than average. I just have a good work ethic, and it's gotten me, you know, over the challenges that I've been facing in my life. And people reach out to me. People do tell me about the stories, and I hear you, and I see you, and I feel for you. And I think it's just um time, especially with the times that are coming, the times that are here for a lot of people, it's time to step up and start your own path of self reliance. Anyway, I don't want to get too philosophical here, so I'm gonna get back to work myself. So thanks for watching. I appreciate it. I look forward to seeing you back here at the cabin next time. Take care.