I have a photo!!! LOL Newbie from Texas here

[Brandon Pierce]

So Hi BP members,

Came across the podcast first which led me to this Awesome site. I'm 30 yrs old, married almost 9 yrs now, and I have 1 sfh rental under my belt as of 4 months ago that was my primary residence since 04. I purchased the house actually from my parents as it was a back-taxes owed rental. I asked my mom (a previous owner of her own real estate company with my grandmother-since retired from that occupation) if I paid the taxes off if they (my parents) would sign it over to me to live in. It was run down with very little maintenance done to it. My mom was in the business ever since I was young so I learned at around the age of 7 to start working on rentals. At that age, it was more cleaning or honing my skills as a painter lol but throughout growing up and then working on my house I gained a lot of knowledge in the "rehab" aspect. As of 2 years ago we came across a foreclosure in an area of town that we thought we'd never be able to afford (combined 55k salary at that time with school loans, 2 car pymts, along with cc pymts). This area of town housed 200k+ homes and we didn't see that being in our range for a good long time. We rather my wife is the money queen and got us back on track credit wise and really got me back in the game of being financially smart. We drove by this house and I went inside the abandoned house and saw great potential and so we thought we'd give it a shot. Went to the bank and to our surprise our credit had improved to 715+ and they said it was definitely possible. We then ran into the struggle of moving into a contractor lien foreclosure and were given 6 months to turn this house around from a trashed out, graffitti'd foreclosure to a conventional loan mortgage. So while maintaining our 8-5s (my wife is a stay at home blue cross worker) and I am an orthotic and prosthetic technician, I left work and came to this house to work till 12-2 in the morning most nights and on weekends but 6 months later we turned this then appraised 75k home into the appraised now 205k home. What a personal accomplishment! Not to mention instant equity as we took a loan for 156k and all of our other debt is paid for and the only thing we have is our standard utilities and the mortgage pymt.

So that was probably more than you wanted to know but I am very interested in continuing this desire to not being a slumlord but rather take an ugly house and making it something nice to look at and hopefully a place that renters WANT to live in and take care of. I am also very interested in the buy and flip aspect to be able to get some starting capitol to get some more cash flow as well build my portfolio. I am new to this but I have been listening everyday to the podcasts and I will do my best to get on here and hopefully I can gain knowledge as well as relationships that will not only help me, but those that partner with me as well. TIA for the warm welcome as I have seen from many other posts. Any and all questions welcomed.