New Investor/Contributor from League City, Houston, TX

[Harish C]

Hello, my name is Harish and I currently reside in League City a suburb near Houston, TX. To be honest I am as green as it comes in terms of REI, thank god for BiggerPockets I feel like I have hope. Before I continue introducing myself I have to commend @Brandon Turner & @Joshua Dorkin for doing such a fantastic job with this website. I love the stories, the podcast, the forums & most importantly the environment for people to learn and help each other.

Back to introducing myself, I got married a yr ago and we have been working in the space Industry as Engineers for the past few yrs. Though my passion lies in the Space sector, I have realized passion alone will not secure me and my family the financial freedom we want. We needed a way to acquire some passive income and I spent the last few months researching various avenues on how to invest our money. I initially did not consider real estate because of what happened with the housing market recently and the various horror stories I heard of being a landlord. I looked at investing in small restaurants, investing in the stock market and finally just putting our money in the bank and hope for the best.

We have one investment, my wife has a small starter home which we are outgrow. So we decided that we need to get a bigger house while the interest rates are low and that we would sell the house we lived in for a loss. We had a Realtor come by and help us with understanding what we would get for house. Long story short we would take a 13K lose on selling the house option. We weren't happy about it but we didn't know what else to do. The very next day we got an email from the Realtor saying she might have a buyer and my response was how do we have a buyer interested when they have NOT looked at the house. She said they want to buy our house as an investment property and rent it. A light went off in my head and we decided why not take a second look at REI.

I started researching renting/ Real estate a little more and came across all these awesome websites that talked about getting rich fast. I was so excited about the prospects of investing in real estate because we would be so rich overnight and we would be sipping margaritas on the beach by the end of the year. WRONG! Wrong because I stumbled across Biggerpockets and over the course of few hours made me realize that it takes hard work and dedication to be successful in REI. Thankfully biggerpockets also has means that shows you a way on how to be successful by providing access to resources. I mean it when I say it took most of my childhood to get excited about the career I currently have & only a few weeks to get so excited about REI. Thanks BiggerPockets, I hope to learn from the pros and contribute what I can to this forum.

We recently moved into a new house, rented the old house and look forward to investing in more Single Family Residence, specifically to buy and hold. But lucky me, I have run into some problems right off the start and hope to get some help from the biggerpockets community. I will be making a separate post with my question in the appropriate forums. I look forward to this new journey and appreciate any help I can get.