New investor diary - Follow along in my journey

[Eric Merhar]

My name is Eric, and I'm an aspiring out of state investor.  I've listened to @David Greene's podcast and bought the book - and now here I am, sitting in a Greensboro, NC coffee shop documenting my journey so far.  Now, I'm not the best writer but I hope that you find my story interesting and will follow along.

I'm based out of Everett, WA which is about 30 minutes north of Seattle.  I've been searching locally for a property for the past two years, and I gotta say that if your goal is to cash flow, you better look elsewhere.  It's an expensive market with real upside for appreciation.  If you are a buy and hold investor like me, it's just not going to work for you.

I decided to expand my search to the rest of Washington state and even parts of Idaho, but nothing fit my criteria.  Defeated, I gave up.  I just couldn't find a deal that made sense. 

After listening to David's podcast on long distance real state investing, I took a look at the other businesses that the company I work for owns.  Low and behold, there were a couple in the South where the numbers make a whole heck of a lot of sense for me.  I settled on Greensboro, as there appeared to be properties that fit my criteria.  

This was back a few months ago, and my wife was tired of me waffling.  'Just buy a plane ticket and GO, Eric!', she would say.  Yeah, yeah I'll get to it.  I continued to research and plug numbers into spreadsheets, but was unable to do it.  I decided that the only way I was going to do it was to announce it publicly.  I'm an admin of our area's local ChooseFI meetup group (a podcast focused on financial independence), and during our meeting in January I announced our plans to the group.  Folks where very interested to hear about it, and cheered me on.  Now that I'd committed publicly, it was time to get off the pot so to speak.

I booked my tickets to Greensboro, and reached out on the beginner forum to announce my intent and see if anyone was willing to meet.  Leveraging the connections made there and additional cold calls, here I am meeting with investors and realtors to hatch my plan and get after it.

I'll keep posting daily through this week as I learn new things and begin my journey.  Hop along for the ride!

Cheers,
Eric