Just joined. Now what?

[David Savoy]

I listen to the podcast and am really wanting to start, but I have no money, no experience and 4 kids (can't take a lot of risk).  Pointers?

[Jeff G.]

@David Savoy welcome to BP!

If you're just getting started, read like it's going out of style.

If you really want to do this, great. But realize "No [or low] Money Down" means none [or little] of your money to buy the property. Marketing takes money. To start using direct mail with any statistically significant chance of success you'd need to put a few thousand dollars into it. 

It sounds like that kind of expenditure may be beyond your reach. But, all is not lost:

• In addition to the BP podcast you may want to look up No Limits Podcast: 90 Days Do or Die where the podcast host uses his brother as a guinea pig and starts him off wholesaling with a budget of about $3,000 for marketing. This is the podcast series that made me decided to jump into wholesaling.
• If cash is especially tight you might try "driving for dollars." Consider starting a "Sunday drive" family ritual... with the dual purpose of looking for abandoned houses while you're out.
• If you decide to take that approach you should probably read the Bigger Pockets Driving for Dollars Bible. Take notes of addresses and look up the owners in public records and send them a yellow letter. When sending yellow letters like this make sure the property has 50% equity or more, otherwise it's not a Wholesale deal.
• I use this http://publicrecords.netronline.com/ as an excellent jumping off point for finding public records.
• You can estimate equity by taking the number of years the property has been owned by the current owner and dividing it by 30 (the term of many residential mortgages.) This assumes the owner hasn't used their house as an ATM machine.
• If driving for dollars isn't appealing (or isn't going to work with 4 screaming kids in the back seat) then you might mail owners of properties (with the requisite amount of equity) that are currently in the process of evicting a tenant. Often, you can look these records up online.
• For Pete's sake, track everything. I use Podio for my CRM. It's free for a single user account. Feel free to PM me if you want details on how I have it set up.
• Make sure to present an offer to every caller that you can. Most deals are't had on the initial call. By follow-up, I mean send an offer letter for every caller that you can.

With a low volume of mailers it will take you time (months) to get your first deal under contract. Even at a snails pace you're likely to spend $100-300 per month on paper, printer toner, gasoline, postage, and cell phone minutes, etc. But, it CAN BE DONE.

Just don't quit your day job and don't spend money for food/rent/gas on mailers and you should do okay.

When you get your first deal:

• Do take your family out for a nice meal, and have a cold beer while you're at it. You've earned it.
• Talk to your tax adviser and figure out how much you're going to have to pay Uncle Sam this quarter.
• Take a reasonable amount and give it to charity so as to say "thank you" to the ultimate source of all your wealth. 
• Take the rest of the money and pour it into marketing--all of it--for your first deal or two. From there you should be able to extrapolate a marketing budget and stick to it.

One last word of advice: make peace with two immutable facts:

• You will tick people off by mailing to them. Some of them will call you up and leave nasty-grams in your voice mail box. It's a fact of life. Heck, I even had one of my mailers (a standard yellow letter) result in a call from the police--yes really. That conversation was awkward, but it was proof my mailers were working.
• You will screw up. You will lose deals because you forget (or don't have time) to get back to someone fast enough. You'll fumble in some other way. It's part of the learning process. Do yourself a favor an accept that now.

You can do this if you're persistent, organized and determined.