Hello from a new BP'er! Located in Bay Area, CA

[Jason Yee]

New BP'er here. Currently own a rental in the East Bay, CA (Lafayette / Moraga / Orinda area) which my wife and I lived in before. It currently rents for ~$4,500 and we're breaking even with PITI and expenses. We're also fortunate to have a lot of equity in the home, about 50% of what it would sell for right now. While we're happy to see it appreciate year over year, my plan is to sell in the next year or two and buy a couple rental properties in Northern California (outer Bay Area or Sacramento) that strike more of a balance between cash flow and appreciation. I am not willing to do do out-of-state REI until I am more comfortable with doing it locally.

My short-term REI goal is to bring home an additional $2,000 net income per month to supplement my W2 income, and long-term my goal is to generate substantially more than that :)

Excited to be part of this community and learn from all of you! If you have any feedback or questions about the aforementioned goals / plans, I'd love to hear!

[Nick Peters]

@Jason Yee

Welcome to BiggerPockets! You came to the right place to learn more about real estate and connect with other motivated investors. BP is full of great content, so I strongly recommend you to have a look at the following resources:

1. Start by reading the Ultimate Real Estate Investing Guide: https://www.biggerpockets.com/guides/ultimate-real-estate-investing-guide/introduction

2. Then check out other online guides available here: https://www.biggerpockets.com/guides

3. Have a look at BP's blog where new articles are published every day: https://www.biggerpockets.com/blog

4. If you wish to network or ask specific questions about your local market, you can go to your local real estate forum and discuss with investors from your area: https://www.biggerpockets.com/forums/86-local-real-estate-networking

5. Or you can directly meet them by registering to real estate events around you: https://www.biggerpockets.com/forums/521-events-and-happenings

6. BP has various tools available to help you analyze your deals (rental, flips, wholesale, etc), feel free to use them: https://www.biggerpockets.com/investment-calculators

7. Finally, if you can't find what you're looking for, try the Bigger Pockets Fileplace: https://www.biggerpockets.com/files It contains hundreds of files such as ebooks, checklists and spreadsheets for real estate investors. I've myself uploaded a rental property spreadsheet to help beginners analyze their first investment properties, it's available in my fileplace: https://www.biggerpockets.com/files/user/NickPeters

Please let me know if I can help, and best of luck!