This summer was the first time I raised outside money and I still cannot sleep through the night about it
Two investors, $60k combined, and the deal is a land parcel in Adair County that I already own outright. Simple enough that I thought it would not require much paperwork beyond a basic operating agreement. I was wrong about that. My attorney rewrote the fee language twice and I paid for both drafts. The waterfall on $60k looks almost embarrassing written out formally, but she said do it anyway and I think she was right. What I did not expect was how different it feels to make a decision on land you are sitting on when someone else has money in it. I drove out there in July just to look at it, which I had not done since I closed, and I kept thinking about how I would explain it if something went sideways. Not even a worst-case scenario, just a delay or a rezoning issue, something ordinary. My own $14,500, then $18,675 once the actual closing costs came in, felt fine to lose if it came to that. Sixty thousand dollars of other people's money sitting in a rural Missouri parcel does not feel fine to lose. I write down every dollar now, more carefully than I did before, and I send a monthly update even when there is nothing to report, because silence felt worse than a boring email. Nobody asked me to do any of that. I just could not figure out what else to do with the discomfort.
