Hello, my name is Jeff Moon. I'm new to the world of real estate investing and excited to learn more about it! I'm currently active duty Air Force, stationed at Holloman Air Force Base. My wife and I have been in Alamogordo for a few months now.
It has been a journey of about two years that brought me to real estate investing. It started when I stumbled upon the concept of minimalism. I realized that I was spending money unnecessarily on consumer goods and services which, ultimately, didn't bring any joy to my life. My wife is somewhat of a natural minimalist, so, together we have been downsizing our lifestyle. I jettisoned many of the toys and hobbies I had accumulated during my single days. When we moved from our last duty station, we took the opportunity to get rid of even more stuff, which allowed us to move into a smaller, much more affordable apartment. All these actions naturally left us with a large surplus in our budget, but what to do with the extra money?
I read Dave Ramsey's material and really appreciated it for inspiring us to reduce our expenses, set up a budget and avoid consumer debt. However, the final phases of his plan leave a bit to be desired for me. I don't want to wait until my sixties to begin withdrawing from an IRA. I don't want to guess how long my wife and I are going to live in order to determine how much we need to save for retirement. Eventually, I stumbled across "Rich Dad Poor Dad" and the concept of the cash flow quadrant. I realized for most of my life, I have been following the standard middle class spending pattern. Using my income to buy liabilities and pay my expenses, instead of using it to buy assets which pay me back. Enter Real Estate Investing!
I've been investigating the topic of Real Estate Investing for a few months now. I'm in the education and network building phase now, trying to learn as much as I can. The problem with our lifestyle is that the military moves us around every 3-4 years, sometimes with little advance notice, so, we have some trepidation when it comes to buying a property that we may have to suddenly manage remotely. I'm sure there are ways around this that we have yet to discover.
Our goals for real estate investing are to slowly supplement and eventually replace our income to one day achieve financial freedom. Assuming I can complete 10 more years in the military, we would have a nice chunk of passive income in the form of a pension, so we don't need to generate an exorbitant amount from RE in order to live our desired lifestyle. We would probably need about 4K per month from our investments in order to quit work entirely at that point. We definitely don't have a get rich quick mentality here as we both enjoy our work and aren't looking to quit within the next few years. However, it would be nice to work as an option, rather than a necessity, as the years go by.
Thanks for reading, looking forward to continuing the education here on BP!
