New Member: Wilmington / Raleigh / Fayetteville NC

[Tammy Butcher]

Good morning everyone!

I stumbled across this site quite by accident yesterday and I'm amazed by the wealth of information I've already found here just by reading the Getting Started guide and browsing the forums.  It's also quite ironic that I find myself looking at real estate again.  

"Real estate, I just can't seem to quit you".

A bit of explanation. I'm currently in Northern Virginia and have been for decades now. More than I care to go into because that makes me sound older than I care to admit. I owned a townhouse here in Centreville, Virginia. The cost of living here is quite high as some of you might know. Not only that, the townhouse was an older one (built in the 60's) and so, any time I had to repair something, not only did I have the prohibitive NoVa cost to do so, I also had to "bring it up to code". It became financially and mentally draining to me over time. I just couldn't wait to get out of that house! I finally did so last year. Thankfully, I had some equity and I did with it what I do with a lot of extra pennies I get. I put it into the market. Some of it, in fact, into a REIT. So I've already started a little bit of the investing I'm reading about here.

However...

I keep thinking about passive income streams.  And a "what if" keeps tickling in the back of my mind.

What if I wasn't in such a high dollar market?  My plan is to move back to my home state of NC in the spring/summer of this year.  That's a BIG drop from NoVA.  What if I didn't have to manage the property?  What if I start small and didn't buy a 300k townhome but a small condo or some such?  What if I'm crazy for jumping right back into something that I JUST got out of last spring?  ;)

Anyway...you get the picture.

So here I am.  Looking around again!  And looking forward to what I can learn.

-Tammy