New investor from Denver

[Travis McChesney]

Hello BP community!

I've been lurking about for the last few weeks listening to podcasts, reading blogs and forum posts, and making contacts. I've started to take action toward some real estate investing goals so I thought I'd put up my first post.

A little background:

I moved to the Denver area (Aurora) around 2006 and bought a condo to be near my first job out of college. Lucky for me, this was around the top of the real estate market, and the condo soon plunged well below the water line (financially, not literally). In 2010, after getting married, my wife and I decided to move to a slightly larger single family home about 10 minutes away. With the condo being so far under water, we decided to keep it and rent it out.

The condo has never really been a cash flowing property, as I hadn't really been in that mindset until now (Set for Life, Rich Dad Poor Dad, and Cashflow Quadrant will quickly put you in that mindset). My main purpose was to just grow the equity in it for free.

Well, now that I'm wanting to accumulate more properties to grow my passive income, I've begun the refinance process on the condo to pull out the equity and have some cash available for a down payment on an additional property. A friend of mine is also a real estate agent with the same goals, and we're looking to partner up in something in the Denver or Colorado Springs areas.

Anyway, that's my story so far, and I'm excited to get moving on my first deal once I've gotten some funding to do it.