Kauai Yurt Rock Bottom

Rich Roll shares a story about hitting financial rock bottom with his family and an unexpected opportunity that helped them survive.

"We went through a really rough period of time. We couldn't pay our mortgage, we had cars repossessed. It was so bad at one point we didn't have enough money to pay for our garbage collection, so they took away our bins. We had to put our garbage bags in the back of this beat-up minivan and look for bins behind grocery stores to throw our garbage. It was pretty humiliating and emasculating as somebody who's supposed to be head of household.

A friend of mine, a high net worth individual, had a property on the north shore of Kauai. He was trying to figure out how to turn it into some kind of community space. He had read my book and been inspired, so he asked me to come help figure out what to do with the property. Looking back, he threw my family a lifeline.

We moved to the north shore of Kauai to an operating mango farm. We lived in these yurts behind the main dwelling with the young workers who were working the land. When we went to Kauai, we thought there was no way we'd save our house - we hadn't paid our mortgage in so long. After a couple months there, I started to get a creative itch, and that's when the impetus to start the podcast happened. I'll always look back on that experience quite romantically because it created the perfect storm of events to create this thing that has now been successful beyond my wildest imagination."