Hi.  My name's Alex from central Florida.  I'm a Leo, I like long walks on the beach and exporting democracy at gunpoint.  I'm not part of the solution, I'm part of the problem.  When you watch the news and you ask yourself, "Self, what is wrong with the world?"  Boom, I'm your guy.  But hey, the problem pays well and someone's gonna collect that check.  What else was I gonna do with a BA in English Lit?

Okay, all drama aside I'm a security contractor over in the Middle East providing force protection for an American/Saudi defense cooperation contract...thing.  They don't pay me to know the business lingo, they pay me to stand around and scowl at passersby and let them know that maybe they ought to keep on walking and not take any pictures.  Honestly I hate that stuff, the whole 'pretending to be angry all the time' thing.  I'm such a nice guy in real life lol.  However, I will admit that walking around with a P90 is pretty cool.  That one SANG soldier eyeballing you from the turret of the gun-truck wondering if he could get away with an "accidental discharge"?  Not so cool.

Anyway, my situation has left me with a great opportunity to channel my decent paycheck and extremely low living costs into something far more productive than most of my coworkers, who are blowing it all on moonshine and four ex-wives.  I want to buy apartment complexes, whether they're single buildings or larger, multi-building properties.  Once bought I want to hold the properties and use them to create a stable, long term income for me so that I can be comfortable   Unfortunately I'm stuck over here in the sandy buttcrack of the world where everyone wants to stab me, so I don't have the luxury of face-to-face interaction much.

So, here's my problem.  I've never owned a house or had a mortgage in my life at all, so I'm wading into all the financing options as a total newbie.  It feels a lot like headbutting a brick wall, speaking from experience.  Well, okay, not exactly like it because you don't have to dig brick dust out of anywhere interesting but you get the idea.  I can accumulate savings rather quickly compared to most people, but I don't have a home to use for an equity credit line or any of the other creative tricks to get investment capital.  What I really need is to just chat with some folks who know more than me, and hopefully this is the right place to do it.  I need help with financing, specifically figuring out how to purchase these properties with less money down than the standard 20% that a lot of banks want.  I've been watching lots of youtube videos and there are a lot of introductory videos to hard money lenders and creative financing, but much less in terms of detailed material or step by step guides.  

That basically sums up what I want to get out of this forum, information and connections with people who know more than me.  The most important thing for me is getting this all done as efficiently as possible so that I can get the hell out of the desert and back to civilization.  Or Thailand.  Okay, probably just Thailand.  Or at least some lovely tropical third world country where nobody is waving black flags and setting people on fire.