Matt Atkins - Newbie from Denver, Colorado

[Matt Atkins]

Good morning BiggerPockets!

My name is Matt Atkins and I am super new to BiggerPockets community and real estate investing as a whole. I live in Littleton, just south of Denver. I have been a small business owner here in the Denver area for the last 3 years. I started a healthy, gourmet meal delivery service called EatingPrimal from the ground up. This year, I am working on automating and delegating so we can take the show on the road to other cities. 

As so many others I'm learning, my mind was blown when I read Rich Dad Poor Dad last year. I was already a business owner and a lot of what he said just made sense to me. Mr. Kyosaki really opened my eyes to what real wealth means and just how far away from that I was. I started to really look at my current financial picture and realized that I had a lot of work to do to set my family up for long term success. All of my savings and retirement is tied up in my business which I now realize just how scary that is. I believe in the future success of the business, but I understand now how important multiple streams of income are and not putting all of our eggs in one basket. For the past 3 years, I have been so laser focused on the growth of my business that I have neglected planning for the future. There have been seasons that I most definitely should have been focused on bringing in more income. My mindset has been to work myself to the bone to grow the business and the additional income would come. It didn't come fast enough, and as a result, I put my family in a bad financial position. Since then, I found a few ways to bring in more income (sharing economy like Uber, Lyft, Postmates) but recently I've been feeling like I'm not making the best use of my time. Instead of listening to the radio while I was driving around staring at my windshield, I started listening to Podcasts and found BiggerPockets. 

Since finding the podcast and then the BiggerPockets website, I have been absorbing as much information as I can get my hands on. I am dumbfounded by all of the ways to get involved in real estate investing. I really had no idea just how important real estate was to a long term investment strategy. Every spare minute I have now is spent on the BiggerPockets app on my phone learning as much as I can as fast as I can. I've had several conversations with people that I know of in my network that are involved in real estate and will start attending some REI meet-ups in the coming weeks. I am in sponge-mode and am trying to immerse myself in as much information as possible so I can start to develop my own strategy.

As of right now, I am actively searching for ways to get involved in the local real estate investing community. I don't want to wait until I have enough cash to jump in on the investing side myself. Instead of driving around mindlessly delivering food to people or people to food, I want my necessary additional income to come from somewhere in the real estate community so I can learn from others while I'm meeting my obligations. I am open to any and all suggestions and I am so very excited to be a new member of this life changing community.

Cheers!