I-Have-No-Idea-What-I'm-Doing from Nashville!

[Thomas Long]

Hey friends! 

Forewarning, I suck at being brief...

So my wife and I, and our daughter, went on vacation a few weeks ago to Port St. Joe, FL. We'd been down there a number of times, my wife has been going there since she was a little girl, and it's something we always greatly look forward to each year. Well, this year we reeeeally didn't want to leave so we entertained the idea of moving there for about ten seconds, which is all it took for us to realize that the Gulf is where we want to be. We've been discussing options and possibilities and we decided the Pensacola area, maybe Gulf Breeze, would be a suitable settle down spot for us. Right now we live just south of Nashville, in good ol' Columbia, in a house we bought about four years ago for $75000 with no plans on ever moving out. Except now that we've done some work to it with the help of a cash out refinance upping the appraisal value to $145000, and the local area exploding, we're thinking we can get about $225000 or so from it if we sell in a year. Selling this little guy and starting a new life down south while we're flexible with one awesome kid and nothing tying us to this area is sounding just about perfect to us. 

I swear I'm trying to make this shorter...

I'm currently in cabinet sales, with a bachelors in ministry, basically a Christian liberal arts degree, and my wife has a bachelors in interior design, which she is phenomenal at. We make okay money now, have some student loan debt, but it's manageable. We just want that freedom to come and go as we please. So I think I'm pretty much just saying hi to everyone, and a big thank you for having this resource available to all of us. I'm reading and listening and studying and watching everything I can about this crazy, terrifying, exhilarating business and we are extremely eager to get started. The longer we wait, the deeper we'll get in that stupid analysis paralysis! But we want to be smart too... so any tips or tricks or hacks or pearls or whatever you want to call them that you have to share, I accept them all with humbly open arms as a fledgling REI student!

Thank you all, if you've made it this far, for reading this and giving me your attention for a couple minutes. I'm overwhelmed by the community on this site and I'm really really looking forward to getting to know you all better and, hopefully, working directly with some of you.