Sixty thousand dollars cash.
I had never put that number on paper. That's what it takes to get the first apartment, the one that ends a season of borrowed rooms.
Under it, I wrote the other number. The account that has to produce the sixty thousand: eight thousand eight hundred, at last count.
Under that, the honest line. Surplus alone doesn't get there by year's end.
It took me forty minutes to write three lines, and most of that was staring at them.
Right next to it I wrote one more: three hundred a month into a savings account. A date a few years out. Whatever's left rolls forward. And a note in the margin, in all caps, to myself: DON'T RAID THIS FOR THE APARTMENT.
Writing a number down is a small act that changes everything. I know because I spent years profiting off people who didn't.
The best merchants for a broker to call are the ones with no number. You call, you ask how much they need, and they say, "Whatever you can get me." That sentence is music. It means you set the number. You set the term. You decide what they're worth, and you decide they're worth the biggest advance the funder will approve, at whatever rate gets it done.
I remember a dry-wall contractor who said exactly that. "Whatever you can get me." My manager leaned over my shoulder and whispered, "Max him." We got him a hundred and twenty thousand. He needed thirty. The other ninety was money he paid back at a factor rate for a problem he didn't have.
Six months later he called looking for a second position, to cover the payments on the first.
The merchants who came out fine always had a number. Not a range. A number, with a reason, written down before the first call. "Thirty-two thousand, for the truck, I can pay it back in four months." Those calls were short. Some brokers hated them. I learned to love them.
When you don't have a number, your money finds other jobs.
Now there are two lines on a page with names next to them. It isn't the same as knowing how their week was. I'm not pretending it is.
But at midnight, when I closed the laptop, I opened it one more time. Crossed out "at last count."
Wrote $8,812, because I'd finally checked.
Confessions is a series of stories from inside the MCA world. Names and details are changed, and some are dramatized.
