How To Overcome Bankruptcy & Live Unstoppable

8 + years ago today Brian Swan, Hanalei and I departed San Diego to travel the world. What started out as a 2 year trip to re-focus our energy after a tough loss in real-estate and overcoming bankruptcy turned into the Freedom-Preneur life we are living today.

I remember this day like it was yesterday. .

Brian’s phone rang, I can still hear the ring tone clear as a bell. (The iphone ringer that plays the piano riff) it was our lawyer calling.

“Hey Brian, you with Rhonda”? he said. “Yea, she’s sitting right here, what’s up” he replied. “After going over everything, your best bet is to file bankruptcy on this project before you go any deeper. Otherwise, you will be living this nightmare for a very…. long time”, he said with a silent pause.

“It’s your best option, this guy has your name on every document, and you are being held liable for everything”. You need to get out now, or you will spend the rest of your lives re-living this nightmare.

I was sitting on the couch next to Brian holding Hanalei, she was 6 months old. I could see the look in Brian’s eye’s that this wasn’t what we expected to hear. We thought for sure we would be able to fight the lawsuit and beat this guy, but there was no use. The damage was done and we had to take responsibility for our choices.

This would mean losing our home, our cars and the investment we put into this project.
We would have to start over financially. I walked into Hanalei’s newly painted room. Pink walls with small cherub angels on the ceiling holding beautiful ribbons that said “abundance”, “believe”, “prosperity” and “love”.

What does a parent do?

They were on the ceiling so that when I rocked her in the pink velvet rocking chair next to her bed she could see them, I would sing to her and read each ribbon aloud each night. I sat down in the rocker with tears in my eyes, and instead of feeling joy and happiness that I should have when holding your 6 month old baby, I felt a deep fear that made me weep so deeply inside that I couldn’t sing or read to her the words from the ceiling.

After 30 minutes of feeling helpless and worthless, a deep sense of confidence ran through me like a lightening bolt. I stopped crying, and looked at my new baby in the eye’s and said;

“My vow to you was to raise you, to be with you everyday and to never put you in daycare, and I will live up to that vow no matter what it takes”.

At that moment I had no idea how I was going to do that, but I was committed. 8 months later our house was sold, and everything in it.

We went from having a net worth of over a million, to $23K to our name, and a vow to never put my baby in daycare and to continue to live our dreams. On November 25th, 2008 we stepped onto a plane and started this very journey we are living today.

Today we celebrate life, freedom and our vow to never put our baby girl ( who is nearly 9 years old) in daycare. Today we are grateful for that phone call we got from our lawyer that pushed us into making a drastic decision that has changed our life for the better. You see, life can change overnight, but its up to us to decide whether it’s going to be “Lemons or Lemonade”.

We chose lemonade.

We took the knowledge we learned from our corporate backgrounds and internet marketing to start out life over. Most people we knew thought we were crazy…hell who wouldn’t. But our visions of freedom and independence was to strong. So we went to work. Sharing our vision, inspiring other people to take the leap of faith and believe in themselves, because I truly believe we all have what it takes to live our perfect life, we just have to find what makes us tick inside and go for it.

How did we choose a business model?

I had quit my corporate job 2 years prior to work on the internet despite my family, friends and my husband thinking I was crazy. I has researched franchises, brick and mortar, network marketing, blogging, affiliate marketing and MLM’s. Because we wanted to travel and live a mobile lifestyle we had to stick with what we could build while on the road and as long as we had internet we could work.

Internet Marketing, and being affiliates of other companies is what we chose to start with. Why? Because, we didn’t have products at the time, and we needed to bring in enough to live on, since we didn’t have a safety net any longer. We decided to work with a high ticket or “top tier” personal development company because it paid out higher commissions per sale.

As I learned how to brand myself, and market by telling our story and sharing our values by offering products we believe in, our eye’s opened up to a whole new world of earning an income online. You see, your brand is everything when building an online business. People buy from people and once we realized this and started to build our brand around our life and show people exactly what we did and how we did it, the lemonade got a bit sweeter.

We decided to put everything we have ever learned together to teach more people the steps to living free, making lemonade and earning an income online. You can see it here and start learning today and join our tribe of dedicated freedom-preneurs.

This is how it is now.

In the last 8+ years Hanalei has traveled to 6 of the 7 continents of the world. She’s danced salsa in Peru, ballet danced in Mexico, taken riding lessons in Spain and ran from monkey’s in Bali. Her heart and spirit are full of love and gratitude, because she has experienced other children’s lives and appreciate’s the life she lives.
Today we are grateful for the situation, and can now see it was just a stepping stone to our best life, that we didn’t know existed.