Complete Real Estate Newbie from San Diego, California

[Andrew Rogers]

Hi, my name is Andy. I'm 26 and I'm from San Diego, California and I'm completely new to the whole real estate game. I've really only watched/listened to videos and read things online about real estate over the past couple months and eventually stumbled across the BetterPockets Youtube channel and website. I'm generally pretty averse to randomly signing up for new things but after listening and reading for a bit, I determined this community seems well worth it!

I am currently a software engineer and I've been at my current job for about 3 years. While it is a very good job, I am looking to expand my sources of income and long-term would like to be able to even live off more passive sources of income if I wanted to.

In the short-term at least, I'm looking to get into investing in real estate at all and, if all goes well of course, start generating just a little bit of extra money on the side. I'm fully aware it is going to be a lot of hard work, but real estate is also something I'm genuinely interested in even outside the potential monetary gains. From the information I've gathered so far, I'd likely be interested in single-family homes to start. And for a variety of reasons (California prices being only one of them), I'd be most interested in long-distance real estate investing. However, I'm definitely not set on anything yet seeing how new I am to this.

It should also be noted that my plan is to move to the Austin, Texas area in roughly 2 years. California prices are again only one of the reasons for the likely move. After living for roughly a year there, I'd be looking at buying a house (and likely house hacking in some way) though that is, at earliest, about 3 years away still. All that to say that I'd still like to get started investing in real estate before that time comes.

As far as my current financial situation goes, I bring home a decent wage even after taxes and the like and have quite a bit saved up. My savings currently are mainly for putting a big down payment on my future house, though I'll definitely have some left over to put into investing. I actually currently live with my parents still but pay them rent each month, though it is far less than if I were living on my own. I don't currently have any debts and the word "debt" admittedly tends to scare me, even though I know not all debt is inherently bad. For that reason, I'm really intrigued by how people can invest in real estate without putting too much of their own money down and isn't something I understand very much still.

Hopefully this wasn't too long-winded and is a decent introduction. I'm very much looking forward to learning more about real estate and I feel joining the BiggerPockets community will be a big step towards that learning process!