The Epiphany

I hadn't read a book about it.  I didn't know anyone that had done it.  I thought people that did it spent all their time on a job site wearing a construction hat.  I thought it was hard, risky, and took special training.  I had no idea where to start.

"It" was flipping houses.  Sure, I knew it happened, but I figured that it was just super-rare.  But it's like that word you learn for the first time, and then suddenly you notice it everywhere.  What I didn't know is that it was all around me, and always had been.

It happened for me--that is, the realization that I was going to go get the life of freedom and prosperity--in a few different stages.

First, I grew frustrated with my job a few years ago.  With a knot in my stomach I looked forward at the 20 year+ road to a retirement that left behind unfulfilled dreams of living abroad for a year with my wife and kids, years of broken promises to ski more with my kids, and a constant struggle to keep up with the daily schedule when my job called for more and more of my time.

Next, I started listening to a podcast on real estate investing (by Sharon Vornholt) that my wife had added to our shared iTunes account.  Sharon didn't talk fast or promise anything or ask for anything.  She just talked about what she had done in real estate, some of the lessons she'd learned, and interviewed lots of other people.  It didn't sound easy really, but it sounded real...doable.  She interviewed guests that lead me to other podcasts like the ones from Justin Williams and Mike Hambright.  I listened to them on my commute every day with gathering interest, and started learning more and more of the language and the ideas, and it got through to me that there was no magic, just a bit of knowledge.

Then I went on a Disney cruise with my family.  To me it became The Nexus--the place in the Star Trek Generations movie where if you were ever there, you would do anything in your power to get back there.  And I realized that in a year or two, maybe we could save enough to go again.  Again with the knot in my stomach.

Then finally everything changed for me during my family vacation where I had time to think about where I was, where I wanted to be, and what I could do about it.  I had transferred to a new job that I could only describe as the "best job ever" a few years before.  It was as good as it gets for my field...and yet I felt done with it.  I didn't to solve the same problems over and over again.  I didn't want to deal with politics or have my performance judged based on someone else's opinion of good or bad.

It was an inception: that thought that once it captures you, you can't escape it.  Or an epiphany--that I had to end that career.  I couldn't not do it.  And here I had been listening to these podcasts for a few months.  I already had a few rentals, and they were going pretty well.  The education, the tools, the ability was right there in front of me.  It had been an idea before, sure, but it shone there like a beacon.

So I wrote up a business plan.  It wasn't clever--I figure that countless people had the same idea and had either already done it or were doing it.  But it would work.  In the next 5 years, ending the year I turn 50, I would acquire 10 rentals by flipping houses and keeping some as I went along.  I figured it was doable.

I was naive.  I needed more than 10 rentals.  A week later I changed the number to 20, but also decided that it was really more about the cashflow.  I needed to replace my salary with passive income.

So that was the beginning--how I started down this path with intention.  My next step was to find deals, and according to what I had learned one thing that worked was sending letters to absentee owners.  In the next post, I'll tell how I did that.