Here's the advantage of having once owned a luxury motor home, one of those 40-foot behemoths with a huge turning radius: It's pretty much like driving a school bus! That's how perfectly things work out sometimes, even when you've lost the motor home and a $60 million fortune.

Spend even an hour with John Benson, and you'll start to see the upside of the downturn.

Benson once owned two multimillion-dollar homes, a boat, a dozen cars, 50 real estate holdings and that $250,000 motor home. Now he cheerfully drives a bus for the Park City School District. He doesn't want to be a cliche, he says, but, yes, "there are hidden blessings" to being humbled after losing millions as a real estate developer in Utah's toniest city.

On a recent morning he drove the No. 702 to Trailside Elementary in Park City to pick up fifth-graders and take them to a middle-school orientation. As he maneuvered the bus slowly through Trailside Park — one of those large-lot developments full of six-bath homes — Benson mentioned that this one was of the subdivisions he developed. "We donated the land for the school," he noted. "Ironically" is a word he uses a lot these days.

It was a different development — Timber Wolf Lodges — that ended up being his downfall. After the bank that loaned him millions for the project filed for bankruptcy in 2003, Benson started paying his subcontractors out of his own pocket to keep the development afloat, then ran out of money. By summer 2004, county constables were at his door to take his furniture and his $2,000 touring bikes. In July, his assets — $60 million worth, according to bankruptcy documents filed by the bank — went up for auction, and within three hours nearly everything was gone, including his $800,000-a-year income. That same year, his business partner committed suicide.

On the day of the auction, Benson's wife, Lori, left him a note: "I meant what I said — for richer or poorer."

In sickness and in health, too, as it turned out. That same year, Benson was diagnosed with Stage 4 melanoma and was told by his oncologist not to make any long-range plans. But he didn't die, and even though he'd lost his development company, his real estate business flourished. And then in 2007, Park City real estate — the industry where the average agent made a six-figure income — started to sour. In 2008 it tanked. And got even worse in 2009.

By then he'd lost his health insurance and still needed to come up with $500 a month for the medical supplies for his son's diabetes. "The greatest pain I have ever experienced," he says now, "is the feeling of letting down my family."