Hello from Ketchikan, Alaska

[Kareem C Micheli]

Hello everyone, I hope everyone is doing good on this thursday afternoon. Currently I live in Ketchikan Alaska, been here with my family for a year now. I was brought to this site because I was interested in starting to invest in real estate, I found a lot of useful information from the forums about some of the more notable gurus. After learning a lot from just the forums I decided to become a member. 

My wife and I are both from Idaho we recently just bought a duplex back in Idaho i'm sure I overpaid but I just really wanted to get started and just stop sitting on the sidelines. I guess it will be safe to say this is my second attempt at real estate, back in 2004 I bought 40 acres that I will finally have paid off in a couple of months. Then in 2005 We bought a vacant lot with owner financing. Felt I had enough bare land that wasn't really doing anything to bring in cashflow so we bought a townhouse that was part of a triplex this was early in 2007. Lived in that for a year then in summer work moved us out to Virginia where we bought another family home. Then as we know everything kind of changed the first house we bought we rented that out to family, learned some great lessons there!! Then in 2009 my property taxes doubled I was getting a homeowners exemption for the property and didn't even know it. Plus the rent we were charging family was just enough to cover our mortgage so when the taxes went up we were now losing money. With losing money and having to track down rent every month we sold that house for just what we had left on the mortgage that was pretty much a loss of 25k. Had to do a short sale on the home in Va a couple of years later, and that vacant lot, i can't give that thing away. Had it for sale for three years paid 45k had it as low as 12k never got an offer.  

This time around I am trying to be smarter, trying to learn from my mistakes, and just needing to do it right this time for my family. Always looking for any kind of advice or help, i don't know what I can offer in return but i will do my best to do what I can to payback any help. 

Nice to meet everyone and look forward to working with you in the future. 

Kareem 

[Matthew Moore]

Keep up the good work! You've done more than most on BP. You've already dove into the life lessons of real estate! Now that you have such a large blog with endless amounts of information I'm sure you'll now be able to analyze and make better investment purchases