Ask the Builder True Tales Series - #1 Saratoga Lake NY

You decide to retire in a cozy cottage on the serene east shoreline of Saratoga Lake and upstate New York

watching glorious sunsets, oil painting, and hiking become your new pastimes. But you decide that you also need to have a new detached garage and a retaining wall behind her home

to control the water that flows down the steep hill. but out in the lake there are unethical contractors in their six-figure bass boats trying to lure you in

Should you make a mistake and accept their lure and bite into it and get hooked, you might stand to lose tremendous sums of money and peace of mind

Take a seat so that you can hear a true story about a trusting couple that gave a contractor $70,000, hoping that work would start soon but never did

Your next stop The Ask the Builder TrueTale Zone Hi I Tim Carter askthebuilder and I want to share with you a true story that just happened to me over the past two months

This is a new experiment. I hope you'd like this type of video. I probably should have done this a long time ago because, after all, I'm Ask the Builder

If you like this video, make sure you do hit the like button. If you have not subscribed, make sure you do

Those things help this video rise in the rankings of YouTube and allow me to make more videos for you

Here's what happened. Back this past spring, a married couple decided that they needed a detached garage and a retaining wall at their home

And they live on Saratoga Lake in upstate New York. They had some plans drawn

they talked to the contractor and they signed a contract and the contractor asked for a $60,000 deposit

Now you may think that normal but the truth is there was nothing custom on this job There were no custom materials that had to be purchased You can believe and you can know that the contractor has got charge accounts with all of the

subs, with all of the supply houses, with all the concrete companies, etc

So he doesn't need to get money up front. That's the first takeaway from this story

You should only give contractors money up front. if you have something custom ordered on your job that's non-returnable

If the contractor insists on a deposit, you just tell him that you're uncomfortable and that you are willing to negotiate a very fair payment schedule, even if you have to pay him twice a week

Typically, the contractors want to deposit because they don't trust that you're going to pay them

and if you make a mistake and pay a contractor, his profit before the job even begins

he loses interest in the job. Does it make sense? Here's what happened

Month after month went by and no work happened on this job By the early fall the homeowners became concerned and they reached out for my help They decided to hire me on a consulting basis and at the end of October they actually asked me to

come to their home, and I actually do that in certain cases. When I got to their house, I quickly

discovered that they really didn't have a clear understanding, and they couldn't answer a lot of

of my questions about what they were to receive that was in the contract. I found that very

disturbing. What's the lesson there? In other words, when you, before you sign a contract

you have to have a clear understanding of exactly what's going to happen. It's that simple

If you don't have a clear understanding, do whatever it takes to get that understanding

If they need to show you photographs, if you need to go to Instagram, if you need to

need to go to Pinterest, if you need to go to Google Images, and download pictures of exactly

what you want, make those part of the contract. It's very simple to do. Create a simple document

transform it into a PDF file, and make that PDF file part of..