New Investor from Portland Oregon

[Joel Fischer]

Hello Bigger Pockets Community,

My name is Joel Fischer. I am from Portland Oregon. I work for a business association doing government relations. I am a bit of a part time entrepreneur and newly minted real estate investor. I also find work part time, although much less so now, as a photographer.

My goal in real estate is to build enough passive income to allow me to quit my job and focus on other pursuits, such as: traveling, living abroad, photography, investing in other businesses (which I will discuss at the end), and continuing to invest in real estate, of course. I am most interested in investing in multi family properties and I hope to soon be investing in small, or even large or medium sized apartment complexes. Eventually I would like to own my own single family residence within the urban core of Portland, but there is a premium for a purchase like that. I have also tossed around the idea of starting our own property management company with another real estate investor friend of mine.

I purchased my first home December of 2013. It is a multi-family duplex. I purchased it as an owner occupied residence with 3.5% down. I lived in it for a year then I began renting it out as a vacation rental on Airbnb. I automated my system and made a good return, especially during the summer. I continued to save a big portion of my salary and all of the profits from my vacation rental to use as a down payment on my second property.

I attempted to purchase my second multi family property as an owner occupied residence with 3.5% down, but unless I refinanced out of my FHA loan on my first property, I needed to come up with 15% down for property #2. I could not refi the first property at the time because after getting an appraisal, my loan to value was not where the bank needed it to be.

I had to get creative, and I somehow pulled it off without reading a single real estate book or looking at biggerpockets.com! Although I did get bailed out by my loving aunt, Marcia Maynard, who is very active with Bigger Pockets (check out podcast #83). Property #2, long story short, the bank wanted $40k down and wanted to reserves of another $20k, for a total of $60k in my bank account. I only had $20. I took out a $20k loan from my mother on a 3 year repayment plan and borrowed $20k from my aunt and uncle which was paid back the day after the loan closed.

My second purchase was two dilapidated homes on a single tax lot. I put a lot of sweat equity into fixing them up and now have long term renters and I have excellent cash flow from this property.

I have finally started reading more real estate books, The Millionaire Real Estate Investor and The Book on Rental Property Investing by Brandon Turner (hopefully Brandon has a keyword alert for his name set up and he sees this!)

I am in the planning phase for purchasing property number 3, I am considering doing a cash out refi on my first property (still paying $200 a month PMI), and I have lots of questions that I am eager to post to the Bigger Pockets forums.

I am involved in two other small business ventures. The first is a men’s furnishings company that specializes in bow ties and ties, it is called Bowyer and Fletcher and is based in Portland Oregon. The second investment is a two-fer, a cocoa farm and a pig farm in Ghana, a small and productive country in West Africa. I am also on the board of a small nonprofit that builds schools in Ghana.

Thanks all for reading!

-Joel Fishcer