New from the St. Louis - Metro East

[Zachary Dellamano]

Hello everyone!

I'm 30 years old from Godfrey, Illinois, which is about thirty minutes east of down town St. Louis, Missouri. I work for a mid size police department in the area. I would say that my wife and I are better than average with our finances, making ourselves newly debt-free aside from our mortgage, which is relatively low. We also keep all monthly expenditures low. With two educated middle-class wages, this has allotted us a disposable take-home income that is greater than what most of our individual peers bring home from their annual salary. Although we're pretty financially disciplined we do spend money on traveling quite a bit, as I'm a pretty big roller coaster nerd. We're not afraid to spend money to go somewhere or to have a good time, since we make sacrifices elsewhere. If I had to say I had one vice it is cars. Just this past year I purchased my dream car, being a 2015 Subaru WRX/STI (obnoxious looking rally inspired little fast car.. the ones with the big obnoxious wings on the back). It was a regrettable decision, but at least it is paid for. 

 We've shifted our gears (see what I did there?) more toward investing. Our ultimate goal is to own several properties to supplement our income and enhance our retirement, in addition to our current self funded retirement plans and my city pension. We would like to accomplish this by buying good quality rental properties in the area, which luckily come at a very reasonable cost. We would also like to start dabbling in the market and we wouldn't be afraid start off taking a few risks with a small sum of money once we educate ourselves further. I've heard $5,000 is a good starting point.

This is a new journey for us, which you could say began last summer when my department transferred me to the detectives division in July, 2015. With only four years on the job, and no previous law enforcement experience before that, I was honored. I really thought I had the world by the balls. After working my rear off for the next three months I felt like a sucker. Here I was surrounded by 10 other guys who had an extreme passion for doing this stuff, while I was miserable. The only conclusion that I could come to was that I was doing literally two to three times more work for the exact same pay. At the same time, I was miserable, my personal life was suffering, I dreaded going into work, and I missed my 12-hour shift schedule where I essentially worked 160 days a year. The Monday-Friday "nine to five" was great, except as you can imagine the hours seldom fit that profile.

At the end of September, I requested a transfer and went back to my patrol unit. I was happy again and I continued to do thorough work with pride. I started to enjoy life again. However, I was stuck without a goal. I read quite a bit, including a lot of non-fiction, with the occasional fiction novel thrown in. I mostly love to read about things where I can be entertained and I can learn at the same time. One day it hit me. Over the past several years I had learned a ton of usable nutritional information from books like "Wheat Belly" and "Grain Bran" to vastly improve my health, clear up some previous dietary related medical conditions, and shave my body fat down to around 12%. Why couldn't I use this archaic tool or reading to better my position in life? 

"Rich Dad Poor Dad" was my first stop and it drastically changed the way my wife and I think about money. We were on a good track before, and now we're on a better one, partially thanks to our past financial discipline. Since then, I've been spending time on Investopedia, Kiplinger, Forbes, Etc., while watching educational youtube videos and usually capping my day off with a real estate book. Our goal is to buy our first rental property in the beginning of the year and learn as much as possible until then. We'll use this as our trainer until the year after that when we can decide to pay off the rental or buy another one (likely). We're fortunate enough to live close to an area where there are an abundance of fixer upper properties in the $25,000-$35,000 range, with other move-in rental properties ready to cash flow in the $40,000-$50,000 range. 

What we have going for us is our like mindedness, our free time since my wife works remotely from home, and our disposable income to feed our investment. We also don't plan on having a child for another 3-5 years and even then we've always has the same goal to be "one and done" in that area. What we do NOT have going for us is the ability to 'do-it-yourself,' since I can mess up a wet dream when it comes to maintaining my own property, let alone another one. However, we do have plenty of awesome hands-on friends who are dependable and could use extra cash. We can also learn from my sister and her long-term boyfriend who also own two rentals and flip older homes as a side hobby/income. We're looking to not only learn a ton of information, but to hopefully meet new people who can help us along the way. We're not in this to 'get rich quick,' but we would like to improve our monthly income through real estate investing while keeping our overall debt low. A conservative figure would be for us to completely own and rent three properties within the next five years, which I think is where we want to be.

Thanks,

Zach