Catherine Bell lost everything in 2009 when her family's multimillion-dollar company collapsed during the recession and her husband got sick. She learned to own small stakes in many businesses instead of one. That diversification let her take a month off to care for her husband in the hospital without financial panic.
single source of income is a single point of failure. And when we lost everything in 2009, that was the biggest thing I wanted people to understand is that we were 100% owners in one company. Yes, at the time it was a multimillion dollar company. We sold it, but then of course my husband got sick, the economy crashed, like all the things happened because we had one income source. We were 100% owners of one company. And that's when I realized, and like clued into, it was better for us to be a small percentage owner in hundreds of companies rather than 100% owner in one. That was really important. So it creates flexibility. So it gives you options to expand when survival isn't tied to one paycheck. That gives you some breathing room. Like I can tell you, all of us here are going through some hard things. And you never know when people are going through hard things, but most of us are going through hard things when we don't even realize. And having this breathing room, like, you know, there's a friend of ours, something happened to her son, and she literally was able to drop everything and go just literally be in the hospital with her son for weeks. Same when Christopher, you know, when he got sick and literally like in the hospital every single day for 4 weeks, like I was able to drop everything and just go be there with him without having to worry about the money. Again, we don't plan for these tragedies. However, having it set up so you have the passive income makes it be okay. So this enables strategy.
