Newbie from N. Colorado

[Thomas Zuck]

Hello everyone, I am super excited to have found bigger pockets. My name is Tom, I work in oil and gas in Northern Colorado. I turn 37 this summer, I am married with 3 kids, and I am looking forward to (re)starting my real estate investment career. I say restart because I unknowingly did a house hack with my first house, purchased in 2011, and rented a room to my long-time friend. 2 years later, my now wife, moved in and my roommate moved out. My wife also owned her own condo, so we had that as a rental.

In 2015 we (somewhat regretfully) sold both our places and put the equity into some land and we designed a custom built home. We love our home, and we would not have been able to afford it without the equity we used from our two houses, but I have always felt like we could have ended up in the same place and still kept the two properties as rentals. Fast forward to 2019 and I started to get the itch to make something happen, I have been aggressively stacking cash to try to buy our first rental property going into it with our eyes wide open.

For whatever reason, I didn't even know out of state investing was a thing, I just assumed I had to invest in our super high priced market that we live in. Thanks to bigger pockets, podcasts, and all of your stories, my eyes are opening to a much bigger picture. I originally set a goal to buy 1 house in our market by 2022, which I will maintain that goal, but I have set a newer goal of 3 out of state properties by the EOY2020!

Wow! Putting it out there for the whole world to see, now I have to be accountable to that! Looking forward to connecting with you all and keeping you updated on my progress!

Tom

[Thomas Zuck]

Just like a lot of people, 2020 kicked me in the teeth and squashed my plans. I got scared and used my cash to pay off our cars and refinance our home to save some money.

I spent the whole year learning and focusing on what I could control with my career and the economy.

I feel like I am back on my feet, and I wanted to come back here to announce, I put my first rental property under contract today! It's a SFH here in N. CO, and it has a long term tenant (14 years).

I picked it up off market through an agent here that I have had a relationship with for all our other personal properties, and I feel like this was the perfect one for me to get started, investing with training wheels.

I just want to thank @Zeke Liston for the time he spent helping me last year.

Slow going for now, but picking up momentum in 2021!