New member from Anaheim, CA

[Jonathan Rempel]

My name is Jonathan Rempel and I have no real background in real estate investing. My experience has come from watching friends and family in the real estate business, either as general contractors, agents, brokers, and buy and hold investors. I've always been interested in real estate as my dad was a general contractor for almost 30 years (I spent many a sick day, summer vacation, or earning a few extra bucks on the job site with him) and my grandfather before him built large commercial structures.

Living in the Los Angeles and San Bernardino areas for most of my life, I’ve seen a lot of ups and downs in the real estate market. Not knowing enough about real estate, the many different investment models, and taking my parent’s less than good experience in owning rental properties, I stayed away from real estate and treated it only as dream.

In the last couple years that has changed though. I was looking to spend some more time with parents up in Seattle area as they are now in their early 60s, and I went job hunting up there. I couldn’t find anything and instead settled on a great job working for a medical device company in Irvine, CA that I enjoy doing but I don’t love to do. So I started looking at a typical 7-5 or 8-6 type of job as a hindrance on my ability to live life and that led to my looking again at real estate. I’ve heard lots of great stories from people I have met over the years, be it from flippers, commercial real estate investors, or just regular folks that are slowing building a portfolio of rental properties to support them in retirement.

My goal is to learn everything I can, as quickly as I can, to get to the point that I can leave my career in the medical device field and go into flipping and investing full time. 5 years from now I would like to not have to be actively looking for properties to own anymore (although I will likely keep doing so), 2 years from now I would like to quit my current job and pursue some type of full time flipping and buy to hold business, and In the next 12 months I would like to have flipped 2-3 properties and have my first rental.

I’m not sure what the entire picture looks like yet or how I will get there but when I ran across the BiggerPockets podcast while looking for something to expand my knowledge and to listen to during my drive in to and from work, it seemed like a godsend.

So in summation, thank you to Brandon and Josh for getting me here via podcast, I’m looking forward to getting to know the rest of you on this site, and I’m ready to start this crazy new adventure!