The Pharmacy(TM)

Nearly a year after Cely’s first default on her payment, more of our debtors began showing signs of trouble.

Ms. Mayda and Ms. Peachie, although they knew nothing about each other (actually none of our debtors were aware of each other), could virtually be identical people. Being women in their early thirties, both were younger than Aling Cely—who was already in her fifties. Both were married to husbands working overseas: Mayda’s husband was an IT engineer in Dubai, while Peachie’s hubby was a marine officer who worked in a US submarine stationed in the Middle East. Both were mothers of two, both managed 2-door rental properties: Mayda had 2-door apartments for rent, while Peachie had 2 commercial spaces, similar to Aling Cely’s—which Maya’s shop now occupied.

And both of them stopped their interest payments in October 2006.

Throughout the months of November and December and even going through the New Year into 2007, Maya and I went through the long and tiring task of collecting and pursuing the payments of Mayda and Peachie.

Mayda and Peachie were also identical in their methods to avoid payment, which I shall christen: The Litany of the Debtor:

• “Baka pwedeng Monday na lang” (Can I give it on Monday instead). Both initially asked for a slight extension of a few days, which later became months.
• “Wala siya. Nasa probinsya. Tulog.” (She’s not here. She’s in the province. She’s still asleep). Both, as more time passed, were becoming increasingly difficult to contact. In both cases, we would hear conflicting stories of them leaving for their individual provinces, only to be back in a few hours, and then off to the provinces again later.
• “Eto hawakan mo muna itong cheke ko.” (Here, can you hold this cheque first). When pressed, both eventually surrendered post dated cheques to cover their payments—only to later inform us not to deposit the cheques until the accounts were funded. Both would abuse the “it’s still clearing” or “it didn’t clear” excuse to death before the cheques ended up bouncing eventually.
• “May sakit kami. Namatayan kami.” (We’ve got someone sick. Someone died). Both suddenly had sick children (Aling Cely had earlier pioneered this excuse), then sick relatives, then dead relatives—which, they claimed, were temporarily tying up their cash flow.
• “Wag kang mag-alala, magpapadala na.” (Don’t worry, I’ve got money coming). At all times both asked us never to worry since the worst case scenario was that their husbands would send money to take care of everything. This of course, would never really materialize.

Mayda’s case was also further distressing when we did some investigation and found that she already had a history of borrowing money from lenders and then forgetting about the debts.

When I was working in the bank’s credit risk department, we had a term for a particular category of bad borrowers: First Payment Defaults (FPD) or Non-Starters. These are people who never bothered paying their debt in the first place. All banks in general are wary of this class of borrowers that extensive statistics and profiling have been done to identify potential FPDs to avoid lending to them. Later, loan-fraud syndicates became wise to this strategy and would counter-act this by paying the few payments faithfully at first, and slowly borrowing more money, only to sting the bank later when the loan was large enough.

Mayda, likely without knowing it, was doing exactly this. She had borrowed Php100,000.00 from us first, then was paying us faithfully for three months, then borrowed another Php150,000.00, and continued paying for another three months then she stopped. We discovered later that we were only one of a long list of lenders already after her. Strangely, for a woman with a bad credit history—this did not prevent her from borrowing more money, or keeping her past secret (we found out about it from her own household). I’ll continue the story of our encounter with this “unprofessional” swindler in later posts.

Peachie, who owed us Php300,000.00, had a credit history that was not as sordid as Mayda’s, but had her own list of broken promises which we would uncover later. However, while Mayda’s faults seem contained to just swindling money, Peachie’s story ran into deeper depths. The further details on how we encountered collection from Ms. Peachie were particularly surreal and distressful in themselves that I will save some space for that part of my story for later.

What Maya and I first found confusing and then later irritating, was that our debtors logically shouldn’t really be having any trouble. In my previous post I described our very careful selection criteria which ensured that these people should be having enough cash to repay both their interest and principal. The bitter truth, of which I was already afraid of even before we had lent a single peso to anyone was that people who really had multiple sources of cash, as we thought our borrowers had, should have very little reason to borrow money. The mere fact that these women had resorted to borrowing, and especially at the rates we were offering, was indication enough that they had a NEED for the cash. Whatever cash flows they had, or represented that they had, either didn’t exist or was already accounted for and spent on other things.

In short, it was becoming increasingly apparent that we’d been fucked. Big time.

In his highly-depressing play, Hamlet, where everyone character dies in the end, Shakespeare wrote: “When troubles come, they come not single spies but in battalions.” A more modern version of the same expression is: “When it rains, it pours.”

While we were preoccupied with collection, another blow happened to Maya. The commercial space which Maya was using for her fast-food shop, shared electricity with Aling Cely’s main house, via a sub-meter arrangement. Cely would bill Maya her share of the electric bill and Maya would faithfully remit the amount to Cely for payment to Meralco along with the rest of the bill. In January 2007, the electricity to Aling Cely’s house was cut by Meralco.

When confronted by Maya, Aling Cely finally confessed that she had not been remitting the electric bill payments to Meralco for going on two months already. In a now all too familiar litany of excuses (see above), Cely’s previously somber tone changed dramatically into one of sly and cunning. Cely demanded that Maya settle the TOTAL bill of Cely’s family or risk not having electricity to run her shop. Maya was being swindled here too.

Maya was furious and sought assistance from the local barangay authorities to intercede. Aling Cely was suddenly unreachable, and refused to listen to any demands. This was notwithstanding her full knowledge that she still owed us Php174,000.00, and interest payments for which was now threatened because the loss of power would damage the operation of Maya’s shop.

In February 2007, due primarily to a lack of electricity, which caused low customer patronage, a distressed and depressed Maya, sadly closed her shop—and losing with it, much needed cash flow. Her quiet but industrious salesgirl, Lalaine, became a small bright spot in the dark when she offered to buy most of Maya’s now defunct equipment.

In April 2007, Maya and I took a little time off our distraught schedules to take young Lalaine home to Navotas and to reflect upon the adverse turn of events. By this time, Aling Cely, Ms. Mayda and Ms. Peachie were all completely unreachable. Cumulatively, our exposure to these three people was already nearly Php750,000.00—and still not counting the interest we were losing every month.

It was early 2007 and it felt like I was already getting swept into a storm that was coming, and I had no clue how far it was to the eye. Nor was I prepared for the twists this collection problem would take me.

<to be continued>

In what would later become a repeated pattern, my business partner, Maya, rang up my celfone one afternoon with bad news.

“Si Ate Celeste, humihingi nanaman ng extension.” (Ate Celeste is asking for an extension again.)

The date is November—2005. My trip to Navotas, which I described in my last post, would not happen for another seventeen months.

Seven months earlier, Maya, whom I met during a leadership training seminar over a year ago, contacted me again to explore the idea of getting into personal lending, which was a business concept that I had suggested to her during that leadership training. For me, I was always on the lookout for business opportunities, and the prospects of lending—on the terms that I envisioned, looked promising. Since I worked in a bank and was familiar with formal lending, I would help guide Maya into developing a selection criteria for the business, while Maya would spearhead the business growth and operations.

We were looking for individuals who needed working capital for very short-term use—ideally just within one year. We wanted to tap people with an already established flow of cash—ideally entrepreneurs and small business owners, and possibly some small-time employees—nothing new as far as lending was concerned, except for one additional requirement. We needed to see that the individual had an alternate passive source of cash—like rentals from existing properties. It was this particular characteristic that we were very adamant about.

With all the above criteria satisfied, we would effectively end up lending to a person who needed a relatively large amount of cash, but would not be burdened with the interest payments—since their alternative source of cash would take care of it. They could then use the cash we lent them for whatever purpose they needed, and their primary source of cash would take care of paying back our principal later on. Since we were not large lenders, to offset the risk, we would charge a monthly rate of 8% of the total loan, which we would collect every month until the principal was partially or fully repaid. Revolving loans, in effect.

I would then supply 80% of the capital while she would supply 20% and would do the grunt work of collection and loan admin. We would then split the interest profits 50/50. Nice and sweet. But as they say: the best laid plans of mice and men would often go astray. And astray it eventually did go, but not for some time.

We utilized the services of agents to scout around for prospective borrowers. Although I was confident of the mechanics of our new business, I was actually skeptical of the prospects. I simply did not believe that there were people there who needed working capital, didn’t mind the rates we were offering, and conveniently had a rental property income they were willing to effectively mortgage to us.

I was convincingly proven wrong there. Within two months we were inundated with offers—lists of as many as three to four people per day would be forwarded to us by our agents. It was just a matter of selecting the first few clients who would comprise our first portfolio.

Many of our prospects were desperate people. I know a concept from my experience in banking and investing that risk and reward often go hand in hand. In lending, people who are willing to pay a high interest rate, are often people who can’t get a lower rate loan elsewhere. And at 8% per month, effectively 96% per annum (gasp), we were really in effect, scraping the bottom of the barrel. Throughout the selection process, I cautioned Maya about this and not to let her excitement get the better of our judgment. On the other hand she had confidence that since the business was a partnership, we wouldn’t lend to anyone that the both of us didn’t approve. And we were both determined to be very selective about our prospects.

Interestingly, even with our stringent screening process, we found five potential clients who looked good from all angles. These were all married women who not only had jobs or businesses of their own and properties to rent, but all of them also had the distinct characteristic of having husbands or one or more children who worked overseas. So apart from their properties, jobs, and businesses, they also had a recurring remittance cash flow from abroad to bolster their payment capacity.

Cumulatively, we were able to lend a little under a million pesos to these five individuals, and all of which were to fund their individual business expansions—which can only improve their payment capacities further. Absolute darlings!

Over the next few months we signed up these five borrowers and things were pretty fine and dandy. By our fifth month our business was generating a monthly cashflow of a little under a hundred thousand pesos—which was good money for both me and Maya. Things were looking up well and the skies were the limit.

Seven months into our newfound cash cow, the first of many threads began to unravel.

Ate Celeste, or Cely, who was our first client, was also the first person to call to ask for a special accommodation on her monthly payment. She had been paying her dues on time for going on six months, but she was having trouble with her seventh payment.

“Nasa ospital kasi yung apo kong lalaki, nasa ICU, at naubos ang paikot ko ngayong buwan sa paggamot.” (My grandson is in the hospital now, in the ICU, and I’ve spent my working capital this month on medicines).

Being our first experience with default, we were not aware of the “standard excuses” defaulting debtors give. Nor were we aware, despite our deliberate selection of clients, of the telling signs that a person was no longer willing to repay their debt. As my story progresses you’ll be able to judge this for yourself as the patterns emerge. I’ll also promise to spend some time discussing this topic at length.

Meanwhile, being the naïve lenders, Maya and I were quick to “understand” the somber request of Aling Cely, and accepted her proposal to rollover her interest due by consuming the one month interest that we held as part of her contract. Another month passed and in November Aling Cely informed Maya that she would still not be able to meet her monthly obligations.

In November, Maya called me up on my celfone to deliver the sad news but also to propose an unconventional solution.

“Si Ate Celeste, humihingi nanaman ng extension. Feeling ko binobola na tayo but I think may pwede tayong gawin para maayos ito.” (Ate Celeste is asking for an extension again. I feel she’s fooling us already but I think we may have a way to fix this).

Apart from lending, Maya had been also wanting to get into the food business. Retail food stalls were the rage in Makati’s side streets and Maya felt that it was a great opportunity.

We had about Php150,000.00 invested with Aling Cely. Along with the two months unpaid interest would put the total at Php174,000.00. As part of a unique way to recover our investment in Aling Cely, Maya suggested that we occupy the rental property of Aling Cely—which was incidentally a commercial space on a busy corner in Makati. We would occupy the space without need to pay rent—this would serve to offset the lost interest. We would remain in the commercial space until Aling Cely was able to regroup her finances and repay us our principal investment. This also served to lighten the interest burden on our client, to assist her in getting her affairs in order.

The second part was to restore our lost cashflow. Maya suggested that she utilize the commercial space by setting up a fast food shop there. The shop would now then pay our lending business a rent equivalent to Aling Cely’s monthly interest. Any earnings above the monthly rate would be Maya’s income. This way, our lending business, of which Maya also had a share, would resume its income—while Maya also got to indulge her food business cravings and earn extra on her own.

It sounded like a great plan. And we quickly met with Aling Cely to discuss the proposal with her. She agreed. And within a month’s time, February 2006 now, Maya’s fast food shop was up and running. In her first two months of business, Maya made over Php50,000.00 in her new store selling burgers, fries, and sandwiches—which was more than enough to pay for the rent to our lending business and substantial enough to make running the store worth while.

Running the fledgling store took up all of Maya’s time, and while the store was generating good cash flow, this would ultimately be bad for the lending business if she was too busy preparing food. So Maya began recruiting people for the job of managing her store. She hired and fired four different people in as many months until one cloudy day in September, a short, quiet girl named Lalaine answered her ad.

So there we were. 2006 was drawing to a close, our newly borne lending business was up to a running start. And while Aling Cely gave us a temporary scare, her case was remedied quite pleasantly. Our other four debtors (whom you will be meeting very soon) were paying us good interest. And especially under Lalaine’s guidance, Maya’s food business was making good money.

Being in many modes: a banker, an investor, and a small businessman, I had nothing but confidence and optimism about our situation then. We had to be doing something right: money was pouring in, and as they say: “it’s really hard to argue against success.” Looking back in hindsight, I’m constantly reminded of a quotable quote by the poet Sarah Williams:

“Though my soul may set in darkness, it will rise in perfect light;
I have loved the stars too truly to be fearful of the night.”

Mistake, Doc. Big mistake.

<to be continued>

My story begins, oddly enough—one step ahead of the middle.

It is an overcast afternoon in April and I am driving down Roxas Boulevard. My destination: an obscure locality in the City of Navotas.

A Statistical Perspective

Honestly, I don’t really know anyone from Navotas—or if I did, I never realized they were “Navotan”. To me, Navotas is just another area in the expanded urban area of Metro Manila, just like Marikina (where I’m from) is.

When I started as an application encoder in HSBC, part of my training was familiarizing myself with the area codes and postal codes of various parts of the Philippines, particularly Metro Manila. This was essential to be able to accurately capture information credit card and loan applicants would put on their card or loan application forms. It was mandatory that this knowledge was second nature to us, so we could correct any misconceptions the average Juan had about their zip codes and telephone numbers, and it also helped the bank filter out signs of fraudulent activity (e.g. A guy claiming to live in Pasig City, but clearly had a Makati City telephone number or zip code was suspect).

In later years as a banker I would see the value of this early skill when I was involved in developing credit strategies and demographic studies for the bank. I studied the correlation of certain things such as a person’s residential or work address or to their propensity to borrow and repay their debts. Any statistical conclusions are only as good as the source data used to develop them—and mind you I’ve seen a great deal of crap data in my life.

On that overcast afternoon, it had been almost seven years since my first days as a “zip code sensei”, but even then I still knew that Navotas formed the northern cluster of Metro Manila known collectively as CAMANAVA (Caloocan, Malabon, Navotas, and Valenzuela). The Navotas area is relatively a small place (as Metro Manila districts go) and borders the Capital City of Manila to the north and is likewise bordered to the east by the City of Caloocan.

As an application encoder, I’ve always wondered why the CAMANAVA area was known collectively that way. Why isn’t the City of Manila or the even larger and proximate Quezon City included in this cluster? When I later got involved in credit statistics I saw part of the reason: for some odd twist of fate, applications from the CAMANAVA area seem to be of lower quality compared to other areas in Metro Manila. Not only are the average incomes from this area lower than the median, but any lending done to individuals from this area show a higher tendency to default compared to others.

Apart from these academic notions about debt and address, or my mastery of zip codes, I never really knew Navotas. Never been there personally. So with all that being said, I was just more than a little curious about going to Navotas that afternoon.

Trivia: Incidentally did you know that Navotas does not have its own set of zip codes—it shares its series (14xx) with Caloocan’s central post office. You could say from the perspective of the post office that Navotas is a missing chunk of Caloocan.

What I wasn’t totally prepared for was that Navotas (and probably most of CAMANAVA) is a totally different universe compared to the Metro Manila I knew, from more than just a statistical perspective.

A Failed Business

Before I continue to play Navotan tour-guide, maybe I should explain why I was headed there in the first place.

Those who know me from way back in college and even during my early working years first as a stockbroker, and later as a banker, know that I have a penchant for driving people home. For me the penchant is one part concern (how could you let all those delectable and dressed to kill ladies go home on their own after a midnight company party, eh) and another part curiosity: I’ve always had a wanderlust since I was a small kid, but I had to wait till my college years when I finally drove my own car to indulge it (just another one of those things I wanted to do, but couldn’t until later).

True to form, I was headed to Navotas that afternoon, to bring someone home. In the car with me was my erstwhile business partner, Maya, and behind us was Lalaine, whom we were bringing home to Navotas.

Maya was my business partner in the stillborn lending business. Since this business is pretty much the topic of this whole Bittersweet Symphony thread, I’ll skip for the time being how I met Maya and got into lending—there will be enough time for that later. For now I’ll briefly focus on the relationship between my partner, and our passenger: Lalaine.

Lalaine worked for Maya as an employee of my partner’s retail food business. Maya ran a small fast food store (i.e. burgers, fries, sandwiches, etc.) in the suburbs of Makati City. Actually I really had no actual involvement with this business, but Maya set up this store about a year ago as part of a debt recovery plan—which I was part of. One of our debtors in the now stillborn lending business had some trouble meeting their obligations, and the store was set up as part of the deal to continue servicing their interest payments.

Interesting isn’t it? So how does one set up a fast food store to function as debt repayment? I promise you that I’ll explain more about this trivial arrangement in future posts, but for the time being suffice it to say that despite my partner’s best efforts, the deal failed, and her store was forced to close.

Lalaine, whom Maya hired shortly after opening the store, was a short young woman (I’d estimate in her early twenties) with a small round face, and who rarely said anything, even when directly questioned. Totally zero impressions and hardly the material I’d select for the job of fast food sales.

Surprisingly, Lalaine was actually good at selling burgers and sandwiches during her brief stint with the store. She was so good that she was able to save enough to buy a lot of Maya’s own equipment (e.g. burner, utensils, supplies) when she offered them for liquidation after the store closed in Feb of this year. Maya was also quite happy with Lalaine’s performance, and even happier that despite the failure of the store Lalaine had offered to purchase the equipment to start her own store.

When the time came for them to part ways, Maya persuaded me to assist her in bringing Lalaine (who had no other way home—and didn’t know how to commute) back to Navotas. Like Maya, I was inspired to see people making their own efforts to be productive in life, and I was only too happy to bring her home.

Sights and Sounds

Our destination specifically was the town of Tangos in Navotas.

A late afternoon drive through Roxas Boulevard across the City of Manila is full of great sights: from the Manila Bay sunset (which we were sadly deprived of in the overcast weather), to the glittering rows of classy and not-so classy hotels and clubs leading up to the stately avenues surrounding the original walled city of Intramuros.

Past Intramuros and going through the seedy district of Tondo, the sights change dramatically. Paved avenues give way to potholed streets, and clear sidewalks metamorphose into rubbish piles. Hotel skylines dissolve quickly into squatter shanties, and the pungent sea breeze turns ripens into the foul stench of trash and human waste.

Everyone is familiar with the Manila squatter phenomenon. What people are probably not familiar with is just exactly how large it really is.

Driving past the Bay Area and Tondo into the Manila-Navotas border, one can easily miss the fact that that you’ve entered Navotas. You leave Manila with squatters filling your car window’s field of vision and you enter Navotas with pretty much of the same. And just when you thought that you’ve seen enough squatters and have finally entered the city fringes, you clear a hill and there’s even more of them.

Kilometers of squatter shanties. Shanties on sidewalks, old warehouses, condemned condominiums of a bygone era. Shanties on the water, under bridges, above buildings. More and more squatters. And here I was, driving into the heart of it. Lalaine, why on earth did you have to live in Navotas?

Although we arrived at Tangos just after sunset, the sun was already gone from our sights well into the heart of Navotas. The streets kept shrinking as we ventured further, from the wide avenue leaving Roxas, into the two lane city road, then a one lane road. Lalaine, who was quiet for most of our trip, finally spoke and said that we need not go further, and that she would negotiate the rest of the trip on foot. Not that we could—the street we were on had shrank to a width that only pedicabs can cross.

In this obscure area, way north of Metro Manila, there was no electricity. Although there were some houses amongst the shanties, the streets were really not paved. Puddles of murky water were everywhere—and as we helped Lalaine disembark from my car we learned why the area was mostly wet: there was a single solitary free-flowing water pipe nearby. The pipe belonged to one house, and all other residents in that area bought their water from that house. Ten Pesos per bucketful.

No power and water. Where was Maslow’s Hierarchy in this? Is this 21st century Philippines?

Lalaine sought help from her siblings to carry the loads of equipment she had bought from Maya. She still remained quiet throughout all this, perhaps due to embarrassment at having finally revealed her home—which was way past humble—to us. Even Maya would later remark that she had no inkling how poor Lalaine’s living conditions were until she finally saw Navotas up front. And thus we left Lalaine in that dark, decrepit corner of Metro Manila, to seek her own fortune with Maya’s fastfood equipment.

And that was that. With a little difficulty I was able to turn my car around in that tight street and in an hour we were headed back to glittering Makati, with our expanded notions of Navotas still ringing in our senses.

A Great Divide

You might ask at this point: why did I bother bringing up what was relatively a trivial episode? Nothing crazy happened during the trip—I just brought someone home—which happens often enough in my life. So what’s up with that? Well let’s just say I deliberately took this time to bring you to Navotas as yet another setup.

I want to illustrate a disparity.

Unfortunately, since Lalaine is only one case, you will have to wait till later posts to fully appreciate the comparisons. Just humor me when I say that for the remainder of this story Lalaine will thus serve as our moral benchmark.

Without trying to be poetic about it, Lalaine was obviously not a well-to-do person. I didn’t really have to ask, but having seen her home surroundings it wasn’t hard to underestimate Lalaine’s chances of success. But then again here was a spunky, albeit quiet girl, who was trying her best to change the cards that she had been dealt. To rise above the life she had been born into. To reject the fate that awaited her.

This is almost too much of a cliché I admit. And I won’t even go as far as remotely suggest that all “poor” people are like Lalaine. It’s likely that the sad truth in many cases, is that many are not. But these are actually just my sentiments, only knowing Lalaine for as short a time as I did, and from those last telling moments as she quietly disembarked from my car to return to the shadows of Navotas from where she came. I had no way of knowing if these were indeed the things that brewed in her young mind as we left her, nor will I probably ever know as I will likely never see Lalaine again.

But if my sentiments about Lalaine are even remotely true, this would already put her at great odds with the rest of the sordid list of characters I would meet in 2007.

<to be continued>

No change,
I can’t change I can’t change, I can’t change
But I’m here in my mold, I am here in my mold
But I’m a million different people from one day to the next
I can’t change my mold

- The Verve

If ever there was a quintessential risk taker, there was Doc Ligot.

Do I mean ‘gambler’? That’s just a slight twist of semantics, but rest assured I don’t really mean that term here (although I did try my hand at that too–more on that later). But even the term “risk taker” might probably come as a surprise to many who know me (and I really use the word “know” very liberally). The image seems far removed from the quiet, reserved, intellectual (this is just me padding) weirdo (more padding) sitting at the corner of each group photograph.

No one taught me to be a risk taker. Not school, not friends, surely not my parents. I just somehow grew up with the idea that the pain of losing will never be equal to the pain of not trying. In one of my early blog posts, Interview, I featured a very interesting questionnaire. Unlike the protagonist in that short sweet nothing of a post, my real fear is not the word Always, it’s the word: Never.

Unfortunately growing up in a “very middle-class kind of setting” (I’ll try to define this better in another entry) didn’t really allow me to try everything I wanted to. So I grew up doing for the most part: waiting. Waiting for the time I’d be able to try something. Don’t get me wrong here, I didn’t want to try EVERYTHING. Just that most of the stuff I did want to try, I couldn’t. Later as I “matured” and the economics of my life changed, I was then able to try stuff I wanted. And I did.

For now I’ll do my point some justice and save the examples from my love "lives" for another series. Let’s talk about business instead (i.e. less sex and more money for a change).

In my business affairs for instance, most of my current circulation probably know me as a banker. It’s kind of interesting too that my first stint with my current employer (incidentally my second employer) was a career in “risk management”—specifically lending. Although I started from lowly computer encoder to high-and-mighty (in my eyes only) portfolio manager, my job was essentially the same: figure out who to lend to. So my penchant for “risk taking” was satisfied to a certain extent, at least formally.

Doubly interesting is that my work as a “risk taker” actually came in the form of a “risk avoider.” It sounds a little confusing, I admit, but as my story progresses over the next few posts I’ll try to reconcile the idea that “risk taking” and “risk avoiding” are just flip sides of the same thing. Kind of like the glass “half empty” and “half full” really mean the same thing.

Anyway, in my personal quest for financial freedom (to say it that way because it sounds so noble and cool), fewer people are aware that I own and run a small ramshackle call center somewhere in the one-way alleys of Makati CBD. Far fewer are also aware that I’m part owner of a real estate joint venture that’s built some (nice) townhouses in Quezon City (all sold out, by the way). Even fewer people know that I invest in the stock market and in foreign exchange—both as a trader and as a money changer.

But I even bet (there goes gambling reference again) nearly no one knows the other lengths my “business empire” had taken in the past. For instance, does anyone out there know that I once sold car and truck tires, or tried professional blackjack (that’s real gambling), or network marketing, or personal lending? No one knows about these things because these ventures never made it past the birth stages. They all cost dear time and money but were all business stillbirths.

The pain of losing will never be equal to the pain of not trying. But mind you, the pain of losing can really be painful. Apart from the stillbirths I mentioned above, I once ran a multi-million peso “hedge fund” of sorts and I had as many as fifty clients of varying ages and financial backgrounds (just to give you a taste of how diverse: I had a nun from Iloilo investing Euros with me). The fund took about two years to build up, and in the span of six months, 80% of my investors withdrew their money for reasons as varied as their backgrounds. This forced me into deep debt as I struggled to service their withdrawals without destroying the fund’s assets.

Me, a Clark-Kent-day-job banker, experiencing first-hand what the word “bank run” means on a personal basis. I personally consider the period immediately following my personal “bank run” a dark time for me—a time when I scrounged around for money, endured the onslaught of collectors—some of them formerly close friends.

Although I think the details of this dark period of my life really deserves a series of its own, I won’t go into that here. But I highlight this experience in order to frame the start of my “sordid little tale”. You see having gone through tremendous financial burden up close and personal (often where it really hurts and where the sun don’t shine), I have personally seen the dark side of people when it comes to money—and I ended up owing, and later paying back a lot of people and entities.

Just to remind everyone, this story is really about what has been happening to me in 2007. And one of the things that has changed is whereas in the past I was once a highly-stalked debtor, in 2007 I was the one doing the collecting. I did mentioned earlier that I once ventured into personal lending and that that it was a stillborn business. In 2007, I started the year with a simple mission: to collect some unsettled receivables.

Little did I know that this mission would be far from simple, and far from just collecting debts.

<to be continued>