Newbie from St. Petersburg, FL

[Nicolas Middleton]

Hey All!  My name is Nick Middleton and I work as a mechanical engineer in St. Petersburg, Florida.  My wife and I moved here last Fall.  The three years before that we had both been doing volunteer work in Haiti.  In fact, that's where we met!  We have been married just over a year.

After living overseas for several years on savings, I'm realizing how I needed a better income stream than spending my principal!   Therefore, together, my wife and I have decided we want to try purchasing a few properties to buy and hold that could provide rental income for us so we could go back overseas to do volunteer work again.

BUT, it takes money to make money, so our first goal in Real Estate is to flip some houses for a side hustle.  We have set the goal of trying to purchase our first flip property in January.  

Right now we both have jobs and are trying to save as much as we can, though we have student loan debt which is killing us.  I also started a side lawn mowing gig a few months ago and am maintaining about 20 yards which provides some extra too.  In fact, I just hired my first W-2 employee for the mowing business a few weeks ago.  

So that's us!  We're excited to use real estate as a vehicle to get to where we want to be.  We would do house hacking but we have a phenomenal deal on lodging right now through a friend who had a vacant house in the area and is letting us stay there super-discounted.  

Looking forward to meeting you all!  I have listened to the Bigger Pockets podcast for months now and my wife and I are reading through J. Scotts book on House Flipping.  We read Rich Dad, Poor Dad together earlier this year and that gave us the idea of building assets (though we had that idea already!).

One thought I've had is to get into Mobile Homes just because the cost of entry is lower and there are lots of mobile home parks in Pinellas Park, close to where we live.  Has anyone ever flipped a mobile home??