What Are You Doing to Get Ahead?

These days it seems like it takes anything and everything to get ahead in this world. People are working 2 or 3 jobs, exhausted, trying to stay afloat just to pay the bills to live a simple hand to mouth existence. Some of us are stressed out because of the high gas prices, which are like $4, others are worried about real estate; you hear horror stories of people in great areas like Orange County loosing their house and recessions in those areas as well as people loosing everything they own through auctions at storage facilities.

Is it true then, was Orange County built out of the excess of the real estate market in California, was it monolithic and as codependent on that industry than the Rust Belt was with the automotive industry? Or is what is happening in the real estate industry in America simply the nation coming to terms with the larger issue of a failure of our overall economy in general? Other cities are still building, for example Norfolk is still going strong with over $750,000,000 of construction either still in process or being planned. Despite criticism of Norfolk's projects by it's citizens, which often involve the cities sharing the cost with tax payers in order to attract developers to the area in the first place it has to remain strong in order to compete with neighboring Virginia Beach, which seems to have deeper pockets, and not depend on tax payers quite so much.

But the payoff is there, and years from now when Norfolk looks a lot more like Jersey City or cities in Northern Virginia as opposed to other cities in this region we'll have a good laugh about the struggles it once had. Yet isn't that what heavy investment and fighting the odds all about? To have to deal with adversity, and empty pockets, you often have to undertake desperate measures; in my own personal life me and my wife had brainstormed different ideas about how to raise money or different ways in which we could go into a business. Ironically, it took the insurmountable odds of raising tens of thousands of dollars in order to be able to afford the high costs of adoption to really motivate us to do anything about it.