ABC has a TV showed called Extreme Makeover where they take the home of a supposed deserving family and remodel it. By that I mean that they totally demolish the old house and build something totally new. They do this with the aid of thousands of volunteers and they do it in only a week. No expense is spared. No corner is cut. Nothing is too lavish when it comes to the remodeled home.
It appears that simple greed got to one of the beneficiaries of these extremely made over homes. From the AP (via Yahoo!):
After the Harper family used the two-story home as collateral for a $450,000 loan, it’s set to go to auction on the steps of the Clayton County Courthouse Aug. 5. The couple did not return phone calls Monday, but told WSB-TV they received the loan for a construction business that failed.
I wonder how the Harper family qualified for the makeover. They normally select families with extreme sob stories. Families where mom is dying of cancer and the six kids all have allergies to plastic. I also wonder how long it took them to turn around and take out a loan against the home.
I guess I should feel sorry for these people, but I simply don’t. Not even a little bit. I do feel sorry for the thousands of volunteers that put in the hours of hard work building these people a mini-mansion.
I bet that wont happen again.
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I already commented on this story on another blog. They took out a loan for $450,000 to do a construction business. Now, with the timing of it, they took it out a few months before the housing market went tits up. So, if that was what they were doing with their company, part of the failure was out of their control.
But you don’t take a $450,000 loan out that puts your home at risk to start a new business. An insane percentage of new businesses fail. And one that needs that kind of loan to startup is a colossally bad idea. It’s fine if they wanted to start their own business, but you have to start with something that requires significantly less of a risk than that.
I wonder if they didn’t just try to start a construction business but tried to borrow enough money to have their new business start out on the level of a business that had been operating successfully for 5-10 years already. You can’t make a new business already be successful by spending money on it. You want pre-existing success, you buy an existing business.
I just hope the Extreme Makeover people don’t go getting involved with these people again. They were handed a fancy “new” home and they gambled it away. I just can’t find it in me to feel sorry for them either.