The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
Jump in the discussion.
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It seems like there are a lot of people doing this right now, but I would advise being very cautious. There are a lot of declining "mom and pop" businesses with massive hidden costs that sellers want to avoid disclosing, and newbies are falling into the trap. Water systems that need a complete rebuild, leaking gas tanks that touching in any way will cause a decade of EPA paperwork and fees/fines, and oh god the air conditioning. Not to mention lost suppliers and big clients that are making a lot of rural businesses impossible to run, but which the seller's carefully truncated records will show no sign of.
Someone in my town got conned into taking over a grocery store, and ended up paying multiple times the purchase price just to have the 60 year old gas tanks dug up and the soil sanitized to the EPA's satisfaction. He died, and now his aging boyfriend sells stationary and knick-knacks while serially renting out other parts of the building to restaurants and hobby stores that rarely survive a year (and never pay their rent that long).
Overall not a great investment.
You have to do your due diligence, but I've met people who got started like that. What you said is more or less true of buying any business
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