Hello From Expensive Fairfax VA

[Lucas S.]

Hi everyone. I joined BP a little over a week ago and have been posting some and reading lots since then. But I figured I should formally introduce myself.

I live in Fairfax County VA (just outside of DC). I am not as young as I once was (will turn 30 this year), and have little concrete experience with REI although I have been paying attention to it for the last 5 years or so. I think by BP standards I am fairly risk adverse, but as I have a great job, understand the numbers side of finance pretty well, and am very good at managing my expenses (and still doing tons of cool things), I couldn't pass up the opportunity to be completely debt free before starting REI. I will have my house paid off in about 9 months and then plan on building up an REI investment cash fund. My goal is $2500 in cash flow from completely paid off properties within 5 years (with my current job/cash flow it looks possible), which would more than cover all my living expenses. I am pretty certain I would have to look outside of Fairfax though as all the properties I see for sale would not work for buy and hold investing (cost to rent ratio is way out of whack). After this I would be more open to leverage on other investment properties.

My next big hurtle however is to decide on where I am going to be living/working. I like my job a lot, but would prefer to be out of the Northern VA /DC Metro area, so I am keeping my eyes open for other opportunities within my company. Moving to a lower cost area and selling my house in DC would afford me a good bit of investment cash as well, or I can keep it and rent it out (did that before while on 2 1/2 year assignment to Hawaii ;-) ). Until I make a decision however I plan on learning all I can about REI and other investments, and maybe I can share a thing or two about managing expenses and personal finances - especially to all those young guns who think they can get rich instantly with no cash down ;-). Although I can see that a number of the moderators followed a similar path to what I am on, so they mostly have it covered already. ?

By the way I am a big ERE and MMM fan, so if I ever point anyone that way it is just because they are better writers then I. I haven’t met Jacob from ERE yet (maybe someday), but I did get to take Mr. MMM free diving in HI :-)