How we got started: From Massive Debt to Financial Security

Hi and thank you for checking out our blog!  Since this is our first post, we will introduce ourselves.  My name is David Stone.  My wife, Sheila and I have been married for seven years and have three children.  We currently live in Elma, Washington where we enjoy the outdoors and spending time together as a family.

In this blog, we hope to share our success and lessons learned through our own story.  We hope to motivate those who are looking for a way to get started, but like us couldn't initially wrap their heads around the HOW.  We are two ordinary people with three kids who have done it and you can too!

As many others have done, we took the advice of our parents and peers and followed the path most traveled.  The path was supposed to lead to security, but instead landed us in over $80k of debt.

We were living comfortably.  We bought brand new cars and lived in a brand new house because "we deserved it."  Life was good since Sheila and I were working full-time and could comfortably afford our payments.

Little did we know at the time, but we were headed for disaster.  A change in our financial situation finally threw us over the edge.  Sheila had been pursuing a career in nursing and was finally accepted into a program.  We also found out we were expecting our second child around the same time.  Between Sheila dropping hours at work to focus on her education and the costs of the pregnancy, we were quickly finding ourselves underwater.  

We accumulated more debt than we thought we could ever pay back.  We felt trapped.  We knew that there had to be more to life than struggling to make ends meet and paying our hard-earned money to the bank.  We did not know how we were going to succeed, but we had absolute faith that we would. Through our determination we finally found an answer to our problems.

Through our search, we were introduced to the wonderful world of real estate investing.  Real estate would allow us to live the life we always wanted.  Our goal was to reduce hours at work, spend more time with our children, and travel the world as a family.  The dream life presented before us appeared amazing, but we were still at square one.  We had no money and no time.

We have been investing in real estate for two years and now own four properties.  We rent a single family house and a duplex.  We are selling the house we live in and are expecting to make enough money to pay off all of our debt and fund our next project.  We also just purchased a cash property that we plan on rehabbing and turning to a rental.  Sheila has reduced her hours at work and I have nearly eliminated my job to focus on investing.

In the next blog post, we will show you how we quickly eliminated debt to improve our chances at success and get us out of the rat race quicker!

See you there!