Started with a newborn baby and no plumbing

While my true exposure to real estate investing came in college I remember my first "real start" in real estate investing. My wife and I had just gotten married in October 2011 and the next year we made the difficult decision to sell our home on a short sale rather than sink all of our wedding money into refinancing it. We moved from a 2100 square foot 4 bedroom, 2 bath home with our newborn daughter to a 850 square foot 2 bedroom, 1 bath home that I bought with all out money from our wedding and I wrote a 9000 convenience check off of one of my credit cards. We bought it for 17,000 and downgraded from a home with a mortgage of 160,000. It was the best decision of our lives because we paid off that credit card balance in 6 months by making the same payments we were making on our house and we saved a ton of money owning our home free and clear. We were spending more time with our daughter and less time cleaning a huge house. We had utility bills and a HOA of only 300 a month and the rest of the money we saved to invest and renovate the home before we sold it a year later for a 26,000 profit.