$34k+ in Credit Card Debt to Homeowner in Less Than One Year

At the start of 2019, I had over $30k in credit card debt. By the end of the year, I was credit card debt-free and had purchased a quadplex. Now, we are in the process of building a house and we are actively seeking more investment properties. It came with a lot of sacrifice and hard work, but going forward, I can apply the money I am saving from those credit cards to student loans and other real estate deals.

About four years ago, I quit my job as an associate attorney at a litigation firm in Boston. I was absolutely miserable and thought I may have taken on student loan debt for a career I absolutely hated. Turns out, it wasn’t being an attorney that I hated, but rather being a litigator. I ended up starting my own firm in real estate law, which I absolutely love, but when I first started, I had enough in my savings to last me about six months. Oh, and I had no idea what I was doing.

Naïvely, I thought I could make a Facebook page for my new firm and post about it on my personal page and all my friends and family would flock to me with their legal needs (spoiler alert: it doesn’t work that way). I did zero networking and even spent that first winter coaching a high school hockey team because I had so much free time. When I left my job in litigation, I didn’t really scale back. I still spent money carelessly and I also spent money on things for my business that weren’t really necessary (software, research platforms, etc.). About eight months in, I had blown through my savings and had already racked up quite a bit of credit card debt. I have no idea when exactly I hit $30k+ because my anxiety made me avoid even looking at my statements (I always paid on time and never missed a payment, though).

After the hockey season was over, I realized I needed to focus on what I started. I started to network like crazy, joined a few networking groups, and talked to other attorneys for advice on how to get business. That summer, I started getting three to five deals a month, by the fall it was eight to ten, and by the winter I was averaging ten to twenty per month. Since then, my business has continued to steadily grow and I recently joined a national title company. I am currently a licensed attorney in FL, RI, MA, and CT.

While my business began to take off in the Summer of 2018, I really did not start to aggressively pay off my credit cards until the Winter of 2018-19 and my mindset on spending really didn’t change until the Spring or Summer of 2019 after I read “Set for Life” by Scott Trench. I realized that if I wanted to pay off my credit cards and purchase an investment property, I really needed to make sacrifices. This meant not going on vacation as often, not going out to eat often, and I had to stop my Amazon Prime habit. In October 2019, my now-fiancée and I closed on our first quadplex in RI and in December 2019, I paid off the last of that credit card debt. We are actively seeking our next deal and I’m so excited to be on the right path now!