Hi, my name is Steve, and my family and I could use a little help.

A personal & faith crisis forced me to step down from my successful business in 2021, which had been our primary source of income for years. I stayed on as a paid consultant for a while, and I thought I could just get my head clear and start something new, but I hadn't realized there was a lot of unprocessed trauma and other unaddressed personal issues that had led me to the low point where I was. I couldn't put off doing the interior work anymore. The consultant fees ran out, and we wound up living on savings.

I spent much of the first year after leaving in a near-catatonic state of depression. I was non-functional. There were times I couldn't even form coherent sentences. It was pretty bleak, and I don't ever want to wind up there again.

I also recently learned through a diagnostic test that I am quite likely on the autism spectrum (pending formal diagnosis), which explains some of the difficulties I've had, both personally and professionally. I am in the process of seeking help learning to manage this. (It makes me exceptional at the things I'm good at, and not great at anything else.)

Slowly but surely, I kept progressing out of the dark place I'd fallen into to where I am now: committed to rebuilding success, improving my mindset and health, thinking clearly, working hard, and ready to rock. 

But we've got some obstacles to clear.

In the summer of 2023, after years of taking care of my elderly father-in-law, who had growing dementia and lived in our house, we invested all the money we had left into the purchase of an assisted living home. We did this both as a business that could help support us, and more importantly, as a way to ensure proper care of my father-in-law, whose condition had worsened to the point where we could no longer keep him at home. He passed away in that home in December of 2023. Since then, we've learned that assisted living is a cutthroat industry with many unethical actors, and the business has had an endless series of problems. It has gone from paying our bills to becoming our biggest financial liability and source of stress, and frankly, it's pushing us toward bankruptcy.

If we lose it, we lose all the life savings we had left - about $400,000. But even faced with such a loss, we're ready to write it off if we can just move forward.

As a writer with an ideologically conservative body of work over many years, who has been out of the workplace for over a decade, I've been unable to find a full-time job thus far. I'm a middle aged white man with all the wrong kinds of opinions for companies to feel safe putting me in a public-facing position, and I suspect that's a big part of the problem. My whole professional background is in communications. I kind of need to be able to...communicate.

So instead, I'm doubling down on internet entrepreneurship, where I've been very successful before. My Substack is a bestseller and still growing, and I'm putting the finishing touches on a book and course that will be the first entries in a new writing coaching business that I think has the potential to be very successful. My wife is turning her attention from assisted living back to real estate, which she has been practicing for over 20 years. She has just been hired to start a new office of an existing, already successful real estate team here in Raleigh, and has become the newest leader in a nationwide group of real estate investors. She is poised to have an incredible year of growth and opportunity! In fact, as I write this, she's at a listing appointment to sell someone's home!

We just need a little more time to build.

The problem is, we've been bootstrapping for so long that we're months behind on paying several important things. We've been focusing everything we bring in on paying basic living expenses, but that leaves other things untended. We lost our car insurance due to nonpayment, so I can't do driving gigs (DoorDash/Uber) for extra money like I was doing. We're on the cusp of having both cars repossessed, and we need them for work and family. I've lost my medical insurance, and the family insurance may go after that. Next up will be our housing, and we just moved in at the end of August. I can't bear the thought of having to pack everything up and try to find somewhere else to go with the seven still-at-home of our eight amazing kids. We've gone through so much turmoil the past few years, I just want to give them stability here as we re-establish ourselves in Raleigh, a city we all love. 

We're SO CLOSE to getting out of this rut, we just need a little boost so we can get caught up. 

We are excited as today, January 20th, 2025, marks the beginning of what we hope will be a new era of prosperity and greatness in America. We are certain that we, too, will be a part of that success story. We're digging in and doing the work. 

This is why I'm choosing not to look at this request as a fundraiser, but a kickstarter. If you're able to help us meet our bills and expenses that are burying us, we can climb out of the hole and start running once more towards success, and I promise that we will pay it forward when we can. I know it's cliche, but life knocked me on my , and I'm asking for a hand up, not a handout.  

Thank you in advance for your generosity and support!