to £ 500,000 . All of them carried a personal guarantee so I was completely exposed . I had no problem with exposing myself when I took the loans out because as I wrote in my first book , the only way this system could ever fail was if all the banks stopped lending money … a Black Swan event … and unfortunately , those sort of events happen from time to time !
I wasn ’ t concerned about my institutional creditors , as I knew they would play the long game , so my only other concerns were the tax man and my personal creditors . If I was going to survive this I would fight one battle at a time . I considered making myself personally bankrupt but considered that to be a cop out , so instead I would get everyone ’ s support and make the money again . Don ’ t get me wrong it would have been far easier to go down the bankruptcy route from the beginning .
So , with making myself personally bankrupt off the table and nearly all my creditors being ok with a wait and see policy , I turned my attention to solving the problem . The current business plan was officially declared ‘ in the toilet ’, so I had to come up with a new plan . I looked into multiple different businesses , all of which I believed I could make work . I picked one - it failed , I picked another - it failed , I picked another - it failed . I had a process for finding quick results and knowing whether or not a business would work , so we ’ d put in a week or so of work go and test the market and see what results came back .
However , the results all came back as a failure , every one . Everything I tried to do failed , there wasn ’ t even a glimmer of success in any of them . Things I had done in the past and succeeded at just failed fast . From everything I touched turning to gold , now everything I touched turned to sh * t . Now I am a very together person and this was doing my head in . I would have long conversations with Alison about it . I just didn ’ t get it - how could all these things which had worked so well before , not be working now ? Everything was not working where once everything was working … What had changed ? What was I doing wrong ?
In August , all bar two of my creditors had said , “ we ’ ll wait for you to sort it out ”. Don ’ t get me wrong , they weren ’ t happy about it , but they knew that either I would create money again , or eventually my property would , or at anytime they could always push the bankruptcy button . However , there were two who just didn ’ t ‘ want ’ to know , they thought they would have more chance of getting their money if a trustee controlled my assets . They thought I had buried a big pile of money somewhere and that the trustee would find it .
I explained that they would be far better off waiting and seeing what happened as they could always push the bankruptcy button later . In the meantime they wouldn ’ t be crystallising their and everyone else ’ s loss ; well , their minds were almost in as much trouble as mine was . Obviously there was no pile