Journey to a full time real estate investor

[Kyle Kufeldt]

My local REI in the Atlanta market posted my success story here, so I wanted to paste in a the forums as well since BiggerPockets has been a tremendous tool that I have used in my success.

5 Year Journey to Full Time

About 5 years ago, I got to a point in my career where I felt like I wasn’t getting back as much as I was putting in. So much so, that work was no longer rewarding for me. I no longer saw my corporate job as a career but rather I saw it for what it was. I was trading my precious time, for money. That put me on a course to find a better way. A way that I could somehow support my family but also have the freedom to spend my time on my terms. When I started that journey, I very quickly realized that the best way to do that, was to be in charge of my own business but I didn’t have any great idea or inclination as to what business I would start. The one thing I did know, was that I would need some seed money. In 2011, my wife and I started putting money aside for a future unknown investment.

Fast forward to the summer 2013 and I still hadn’t really latched on to any one thing but was still unsatisfied in my corporate job. That motivation continued to push me to research and try to find something that I felt could replace my current career. That is when I found a book on Amazon kindle that was only $1.00 but which discussed compounding through real estate investing. It opened by eyes to how buying rental properties could build wealth and eventually replace your day job with passive income. From that point on, I was hooked and through my google searching on different real estate topics, I found a website called BiggerPockets.com. I immediately joined the website and from the websites recommendation, I wrote my first “newbie” post introducing myself. One of the first people to respond to my post, was Curt Smith who recommended I join GAREIA.

I could tell from Curt’s enthusiasm and comments that GAREIA was a good place to learn and network. About 6 months later after attending different subgroup and monthly meetings, I started a direct mail campaign to find some motivated sellers. Through that initial campaign of only about 100 letters, I found my first deal. While I had the money to buy and renovate the property, I knew I didn’t have the experience or the time, to be able to devote to renovating the property. I knew the best way to shorten the learning curve and hopefully huge mistakes, was going to be to find someone that I could walk me through the process. That is when I started to reach to other investors and started to take them to lunch to learn about their own background. From that process, I found an experience investor that was flipping houses and also building up a rental portfolio of passive income. I presented him the deal I had found to see if he might be interested in partnering. He ran the numbers on the deal, and we did end up partnering on that first flip. I looked at it as a paid education and I learned a lot from that experience.

From that first flip, I could finally see a path to being able to eventually quit my corporate job and do real estate investing full time. Since the beginning of 2014, I have continued to stay active with GAREIA and try to attend many different sub group meetings as my time and family would allow while working a full time job. My Personal favorite is the REI Strategies meeting held every 3rd Wednesday of the month by Darlene Conquerel. I have also attended many of the Creative Financing, Wholesaling, Intown rehabbers, and Northside rehabbers meetings. I learn something new from each meeting and make new connections which is so important in real estate investing. I also believe in paying for additional education which led me to join Steve Laube’s class on “Mastering Passive Income: How to quit your date job. Steve is such a great resource to GAREIA as are all of the volunteer instructors that spend their time giving back to the community.

As I continued to learn and grow in my real estate investing knowledge, I continued to flip another 4 properties, wholesale 2 properties, and have also accumulated 3 rental properties while working a full time job. While flipping properties is still technically a job, I have much more freedom and my eventual goal is to continue to build up my rental portfolio to reduce the need to flip. Earlier this spring, I realized my successful flipping business and my pipeline of additional properties, would allow me to replace my income in the middle of this year. That is when I set a goal to make the transition to a full time investor on July 15th.

Needless to say, I accomplished that goal last month and owe all of my success to date, to BiggerPockets, GAREIA and the amazing leaders and experts that I have learned from along the way.