Throwback Thursday 1989

So I like real estate.  And maybe I'm working on building a little girly empire of choice properties in my favorite cities, but before I even thought of signing my name on any dotted line, my mom set an example by being a Boss (capital B, okay?) and buying herself a building on Miami Beach in the 1980's.

Sure things didn't go well, and there were some issues of severely delinquent tenants and vandalism that resulted in near bankruptcy, but the lessons I learned are worth more than the losses.  At the time, my parents were recently divorced and my sister was away in college, so it was just my mom and I at home in Brooklyn, which meant that I tagged along on a lot of trips to Miami for fixing bathrooms and painting corridors.  (This is how I earned my Pan Am wings...)

She also brought me along on all of the trips to the bank, so I learned a lot of words like "refinancing" and "lien."  Of course enough time has passed now that she can kind of laugh about it.  But more in the "laugh to keep from crying" sort of way.

"Do you know how much a building on 8th and Michigan would be worth today?!"

Yeah okay, I get it.  It makes me cringe too.  But like I said, there are the lessons...

Plus, at the end of the day, if you're my mom, you're still looking pretty fly in your printed two-piece dress and mega shades!