Hello from Santa Barbara, CA

[Marty Langlo]

Hello everyone. My name is Marty and I have been reading these forums for a couple of months now. I have been keeping a binder with all the great information I get daily from this site.

I've wanted to invest in real estate for quite some time now. My family is the most important thing in the world to me. And because of that and my children being so young, I haven't found the time to dedicate to learning everything I need to know. This site has been amazing in helping me speed up that process.

Eventually I would like to mainly be a buy/hold investor. In the meantime I would like to do some wholesaling and flips to generate enough cash to do so.

One of my biggest concerns has been investing where I live. Even though home prices are way down, they are still astronomical compared to other parts of the country. It becomes a huge challenge to a newbie investor without a lot of money to get started. I do keep my eye out and have found deals but just haven't had the funds or time to capitalize.

I'm looking to invest in other areas and states. Tampa, Fl area has piqued my interest because of the family and connections I have there.

I am looking for anyone locally that I could talk or meet up with as well as anyone in the Tampa area. I would really love to find a Mentor that would help me get my feet off the ground. And hopefully one day to do the same in return.

Thank you to everyone who has contributed to the site so far. It really does help us newbies out.

Marty

[Steve Babiak]

Welcome to BP Marty.

Rather than keeping a printed binder, you could try the following. When you find a topic you like, you can select the "Monitor Topic" checkbox at the top of the thread. To see all of the threads that you are monitoring, you can just go to your "dashboard", hover over the "Forum" menu that appears at the far right of that screen, and select the "Monitored Topics" link on the "Forum" menu. Or just visit this link to see your monitored topics:
http://www.biggerpockets.com/topics/monitored

The only downside to monitoring topics is that you get an email every time that thread updates, and busy threads generate a number of emails.