Selling a home for a startup

It’s been bubbling in the back of my mind for weeks now. My partner knows it, she just couldn’t put her finger on it. I feel like I have no control over my emotions, ecstatic one moment and in a really deep dark hole the next.

I’m thinking about selling my home to fund my startup.

It’s become a fact that we have probably four months of runway left for our startup, six if we pull our belts in a bit.

Christmas is the worst time to be thinking about this because of the mandatory things you have to pay for (like the 13 months pay that is an absolutely real government legislated bonus for all Filipino employees who’ve worked at least one month out of a calendar year), not to mention the pressure to spend in the “season of giving”.

My wish is for funding to drop out of the sky, no strings attached, but we don’t always get what we want. Might as well settle for socks.

I guess I am lucky. I’m 27. I have a supportive fiance who’s a hustler like me. I can still walk and use my hands reasonably well. I have been able to get a decent education, and a shot at academia. I have travelled and worked around the world, and I have been lucky enough to get a boost into real estate investment.

My home is a large apartment in a quiet subdivision of Cebu City. It’s about 5 or 10 minutes away from our office, has three bedrooms and is the size of a lot of regular houses here. By all accounts it’s a pretty nice place to live.

Is now the time to parlay some of my luck? I made the decision some months ago to bootstrap RET.asia for as long as I could, but there’s a major shift in thinking when you’re just conceptualizing it to when you realise you have to actually do something so drastic.

I was cooking sopas (a Filipino version of chicken noodle soup) on the stove one night while my fiance was doing some work on the couch with the TV on, “Hey love, I think we need to sell this place.”

I kind of just blurted it out. She had a blank stare on her face when she looked up and asked, “what for?”

I explained to her why we (and when I said we, I probably just meant me, if we’re being really honest here) needed the money and that I probably only had about four months left to sustain the startup. What she said next, I’ll never forget, “I’ll help you sell it.”

What she said next, I’ll never forget, “I’ll help you sell it.”

Those few moments were some of the longest in my life. Just verbalising my intention felt like an admission of inevitability.