Sold my car and bought my first property!

[Ankith Chandra]

Hello BP members,

My success story isn’t about flips, wholesaling or purchasing a buy & hold rental property but it deals with the change in mindset and purchasing my primary residence.

As of Nov 2015 I had no intentions of buying any real estate property. I had a steady job, bought a brand new sports car(I know, but I love cars) and was happy with the way life was.

Things changed last year. I started reading a lot of personal development books which helped me realize that I was spending way too much time and money on my car. With a heavy heart, I made a decision to sell the car and started cutting down on my lifestyle expenses. Realized when you stop being like other people, other people stop liking you!

It was Q4-2015, my wife and I decided to upgrade to a 2 bed apartment. We finalized an apartment for $1600/month. A voice in my head said this isn’t the right thing to do. This is when I began spending a lot of my time reading on BP. Now, I was inclined towards buying my first property.

We wanted to buy a 2b/b condo that could be rented out later. The condos we liked were over $250K with over $300 per month in HOA dues! Listening to podcasts I now knew that HOA dues can be a killer so this was definitely not an option.

It was during christmas when we decided to bite the bullet and buy our home in the suburbs. From this moment onwards everything happened at a very fast pace. We met a realtor and he showed us a few properties that met our criteria. We wanted a 1 story house under 2500 SFT in an A class neighborhood. We saw 3 older properties that met our price range and looked at 1 new construction which was well over our budget. Our budget was $250K. The old homes were in the range of $250K - $270K. The new property was listed at $330K.

The new home was being built for another owner but he backed out due to a family emergency and the builder was left with this home in their inventory. They wanted to sell soon. With this as an advantage we were able to negotiate the purchase price to $275K. Signed the contract on January 3rd and we were home owners in less than 4 weeks. Phew!

This definitely doesn’t bring in any cash flow but it feels good to know that I am not spending $1600 for a 1200SFT apartment. Yes, we had to make sacrifices and downgrade our lifestyles to get to where we are but it was certainly worth it.
Changing our lifestyles has helped us build back our rainy day fund and we are trying to get to a position where we may be able to buy a rental property towards the end of the year.

I would like to sincerely thank BP community for all the content and all the guests on the podcasts who continue to inspire me on a daily basis to move forward in my investing journey.

PS: I recently listened to podcast #100 which was very inspiring and made me realize I must post my success story.

Critiques/comments greatly appreciated.

Have a great day!

[David Krulac]

One time I sold a brand new Corvette. I had bought it 100% financed using a HELOC. When I sold it I didn't pay off the mortgage, since the Corvette was not the collateral. I took the money and went to Tax Sale and bought 10 properties. So I essentially traded a car for 10 properties. Nice as that red Corvette was, I'd rather have 10 properties!