Hello from Seattle! Tell me it's not too late...

[David Clark]

Hello, all! Super newb here. I've always been interested in real estate, but have always felt it was something you had to have money to make money in. I know that's mostly true, but let me get into who I am a bit.

I'm 31, living in a HCOL area making a LCOL income. I tried to make more by learning software development, but ended up wasting $10,000 on something I a) didn't have the passion to do, b) didn't have the right brain for (spare me the Anyone Can Do It! talk about software engineering haha). I'm married, and we've got an awesome eight year-old who loves to dance and act. We currently have the capacity to save $18,000/yr, despite our combined income only being the median individual income in Seattle. We're quite frugal, but we're not yet hitting that $18,000/yr like we want to.

I listen to Coach Carson, ChooseFI, and today heard David Greene on the How to Money podcast. I haven't read any of their books yet, but I totally want to. What's been holding me back is that idea that I need money to invest in real estate and a) how am I ever going to have enough to invest in RE?!, b) our area is WAY too expensive to do this in, even if we made 2x what we make now, and c) I didn't get started in my 20's like all these other people did, so I should just focus on trying to retire at 70...

But that's not what we WANT. We want to, within the next 10-15 years, be able to travel (not extravagantly), and just not be tied to a W-2 anymore... I want this to be possible. Are we too late? If not, where should we start? I know the first step is to really reign in and maximize that savings, and beyond that would be increasing our income, but that's insanely difficult to do in this city and in our industry. So, what comes next?

Thanks so much!

P.S. Does there happen to be a book-sharing program for members? Other communities do things like this, where they mail the item(s) to the next person on the list, and whenever that person is done with it, they send it to the next.