Hello from West Michigan

[Andrew Russell]

Hi all!

My wife and I are a couple of newbies from West Michigan (Grand Rapids area). We are ready to turn our desire into commitment and actually get started. Our long term goal is not just financial freedom for ourselves, but a business which can provide generational wealth for our family long after we are gone. In the shorter term, we are still working to find our first deal. Buy and hold rental properties are our focus, but we certainly wont shy away from others given the right situation once we gain a footing.

We've known we wanted to use REI as the vehicle to reach our long term goals for a while, but we haven't really been commited to making that happen until recently (not coincidentally, happens to be about the time we discovered BP!). Definitely wish we would have came here sooner, learning about this BRRRR strategy blew my mind and is absolutely something we will be employing.

We've been watching all the webinars, reading the forums and blogs & listening to the podcasts every day, soaking in all the information so we can learn & grow. Looking forward to having the support of this great community as we make our first deal and every one afterwards.

We have preapproved financing, an agent, two markets & the types of properties we are looking for all lined up and picked out. Currently, we spend about an hour a day analyzing deals in those two local markets. Everything so far has been through our agent & the MLS portal. Just this week we began "driving for dollars" (another stategy we just learned about thanks to BP!) and will be sending out some direct mail to those property owners. We would definitely appreciate any reccomended wholesalers working with the Grand Rapids and Kalamazoo areas.

Anyway, it is great to be here, we are looking forward to connecting & growing with this amazing community!

Andrew & Lauren