Steve, your personal situation is a small business person's nightmare becoming reality. I'm sorry for your hardship there. But having run businesses myself, and trying to help coach others through business difficulties, your situation, as painful as it was, is not typical of most business failures. The vast majority of small businesses die because of poor preparation. Be it in the finance end, the performance of the task as required by the marketplace, or simply the lack of the business owners understanding how to run a business rather than perform the function of the business. My last business was in automotive repair. A majority of my competitors understood the technical side of the business because they were former technicians. However, they didn't fully understand the business end of things. While I admired their personal fortitude to step up and make the effort to run their own show, I often thought they had made a greivious error because they turned their back on the part of the business that was unfamiliar to them. Ultimately they caused their own demise by benign neglect. I'm mindful of the one guy who told me that if he only had another $100k, he KNEW he could make the business a success. I asked him three questions. Are you behind on your Federal withholding taxes? Yes. Are you behind on your State sales tax payments? Yes. Are you behind on all the equipment leases you have? Yes. Sorry friend, you don't need to be talking to me, you need an attorney. Three weeks later a Federal padlock was on his door. While I felt badly for him personally, and more so his family, he put himself in the position he was in by not doing the "hafta do's". The creditors have a right to be paid properly too. Unfortunately, with small businesses having an 80% failure rate in the first five years of existance, his is an all too common story.

Smith was in deep to his printer, paper supplier, ad agency fees, distributor payments, etc. He may have innocently fooled himself into believing that he could convince enough of us subscribers to send him enough money fast enough to meet the obligations that he incurred by his own decisions. He obviously wasn't right. But he did take advantage of as many of us as he could on his way down. As a youngster, and young adult I very much enjoyed his writings. He had/has a very earthy tone, while presenting a very professional piece of work. But my admiration was slain by his selfish desire to cover his butt by not being honest with we subscribers while he was probably not being honest with himself either. Perhaps I'd feel differently if he had admitted his errors and acknowledged that he didn't treat his subscribers fairly. But to my knowledge he's done no such thing. Trust is fragile, once broken, it can only be repaired with care, not apathy.