Newbie Intro and Book Question for Veterans

[Ann B.]

Hi,

My husband and I have made the affirmative decision to begin investing in real estate around this time next year. We both have day jobs and our long term goal is to be completely running and managing our real estate, as well as other businesess, investments in 10 years without having the day-to-day job (i.e. the Rat Race in Rich Dad, Poor Dad).

A little about ourselves- I'm a practicing attorney in the consumer financial sector, primarily in residential mortgages. My husband recently left his family's large commercial paint contracting business and is going to hair school (which completes this time next year, hence why we are waiting). When we were in our early 20s, we owned a 2 family unit that we occupied and had paying tenants in the other unit and later sold that to buy the single family we currently live in. We completely regret that decision and realize the opportunity we lost, but at that time, we never considered real estate investment. We have some mild experience in landlord/tenant from our previous home ownership, my experience in lending is more on the regulatory side, but I'm not unfamiliar with lending, closing, foreclosure, and short sale processes because of the time I've spent in financial institutions. My husband has many construction/contractor contacts in several trades simply because of the 20 years he spent working for his family's business (he was not an owner, other family members own it, and he worked for them right out of high school). My husband also flipped a house with a financial partner about 10 years ago. So we do have 1 successful flip under our belts, although rather dated. Also, my husband is extremely handy in carpentry, so he is able complete work on some projects himself.

Our ultimate intent is not to just invest in real estate, but also to invest in salons or other businesses ventures as a result of growing our real estate investments. We want to create something long term that could be grown and ultimately passed to our children. We are in the process of developing our business plan and have not yet explored financing options or networking options. I think we are still in planning and researching/learning stage because we don't want to make any commitments until he finishes school. At this juncture, I think our short term interest would be very rentable single family (possibly Section 8), small multifamily (4 units or less) as a buy and hold, or flip opportunities. Medium term, we are thinking of having both in our portfolios--we haven't fleshed out long term more than what I've mentioned above.

I've read the free intro pamphlet on this site and I've put many of the recommended reading by Bigger Pockets on my amazon wishlist. However, even that list still have 15+ books, and in the year we prepare, I do plan on reading many of them-but the list is still large even with the recommendations. Based on my description of our background and what our short and medium term goals are--to date, which do you recommend as the very first read (aside from the free book offered on Bigger Pockets)?

Thanks for your time in reading my dissertation :)