23 year old engineer looking to build passive income through RE

[Morgan Smith]

Hello everyone,

I've been reading Bigger Pockets for some time now and just decided to create an account. I'm new to real estate and just stumbled through buying my first condo (to live in) that I'd like to rent out when I move again. I enjoy my full time job as an engineer and want to keep it while I build up passive income from buying and holding properties. 

The reason I want to invest in real estate is, like anyone else, having more freedom to quit working to spend time doing whatever else (in my case, spending time with future family). Obviously I know owning real estate can be a lot of work, but I'm interested in learning how to acquire enough properties to automate it. 

I take a great interest in finance and have been listening to economic and finance podcasts. I just discovered the Bigger Pockets podcasts and after listening to a few episodes I learned it is doable to keep a full time job while building a real estate portfolio.

I'm not sure what to expect from creating an account on here but from my understanding a lot of members are passionate about real estate investing and I hope to gain some valuable knowledge from you all. Finance and Investing books are piling up at home and I think it's time to take a more active role in real estate investing, especially while I'm still young.

I'm in the Metro-Detroit area in Michigan and am planning to get my real estate license within the next year as well as start my MBA. Thank you for reading this and I look forward to interacting with you all.

Morgan

[David Faulkner]

Welcome ... as a fellow engineer, I can say that you will have many advantages and a few disadvantages.

Possible Advantages:

• You will have the analytical abilities to run the numbers and understand them
• You will have attention to detail to execute effectively and efficiently
• You will be good at "systematizing" things to automate them and maintain a high level of quality and consistency in your process
• You have intellectual curiosity to try to figure stuff out and know at a deep level how it works
• You may be mechanically inclined and able to understand and debug systems in a property (HVAC, structural, electrical, plumbing, etc.)
• You will be conservative and understand "margin of safety". This may limit your growth rate in the short term when the market is strong, but will save you when the market is soft.
• Generally engineers have sound personal finance since they have decent, steady, well paid jobs and not extravagant spending/tastes (except maybe when it comes to technology)

Possible Disadvantages:

• You will tend to over analyze everything and want to understand every minute detail before taking any action
• You may want or expect things to be "black and white" and have trouble operating with ambiguity and in the "grey area". You will try to find the one right answer rather than the several best answers. REI is a huge probability density function with infinite possible outcomes, some more probable than others, and you need to be able to pursue strategies that could work for multiple positive outcomes.
• You will want to optimize everything to the nth degree when in reality you are operating in a highly constrained sub-optimization environment
• You will tend to develop elaborate models, and believe what they tell you with certainty when in reality many things are not known or knowable because there are just too many variables at play
• RE is a people business. Applied psychology, networking, salesmanship are important things that do not come naturally to most engineers.

The above are generalizations and your milage may vary, but being able to spot your strengths and weaknesses is a good step in the right direction. Good luck!