I stumbled on Bigger Pockets and it changed me!

[Marlon Johnson]

Relatively new to BP have been a Pro member for a couple of months now but just decided to post today. I'm not completely new to REI, my wife and I bought a foreclosure property back in 2013 and sort of house hacked living in the property while we fixed it up. Then in 2015 we decided we wanted to get a rental property. We called the agent who helped us find the first house and she had just received a call the day before from another client wanting to offload a property so we jumped at the opportunity. Late last year we felt a push to start investing more fervently and we began setting up our LLC and talking with the local community bank that we worked with for the other two houses. Everything seemed to be moving along until I lost my job the beginning of this year, mind you this occurred while we were still in the process of getting funding from our bank, luckily we were still able to get approval for funding as well as a HELOC from our current home. Although we had done a couple deals I really had no clue how to be a full time investor. The deals we had done before were pretty much handed to us on a platter, so I had no clue about the is and outs of investing. I really felt lost and overwhelmed. I was just about to pay almost $2000 to a so called REI guru when I stumbled on a BP podcast. I can't express to you guys how finding this podcast changed everything for us (which I'm sure most of you already understand). I started watching podcast after podcast, started attending the webinars every week with Mark Faircloth on Mondays and Brandon Turner on Wednesdays. The wealth of information I received and am still receiving is priceless so becoming a Pro member was an easy decision for me but my wife needed a little convincing. When I showed her the BP calculators (which I use almost daily now) she was sold. We currently have a duplex under contract and are working on multiple other deals. I really don't know what I would've done without BP, so I'm writing this as a kind of introduction but also a thanks to BP for all you do for investors. My family and I are forever grateful!