I did a real estate project with two guys from wealthy families. Things didn’t go well and we lost tons of money. The two other guys got bailed out by their families, did another project that did well and now they are successful businessmen. I couldn’t participate second time due to lack of money and took more than 10 years to pay off my debt plus sold lost all savings.

I think this is pretty common. When i did contracting for a while quite a few of the older contractors had failed businesses and tried to pay off their debt.