Hey BP,
I'm Joshua. I am 33, married with one kid, he's 12 for 5 more days, as of this post. I'm currently in Northwest Arkansas, Centerton specifically and for those of you that aren't familiar, it's an amalgam of several towns/cities in the extreme Northwest of Arkansas and home to Walmart, Tyson Foods, and J.B. Hunt. I am a handyman, for now but also spent time as a licensed home inspector, a craftsman building bespoke furniture, and about 10 years in landscape construction.
My wife and I have done one live-in flip, back in 2014, long before I knew about BP, that took us two years. We had watched HGTV shows, a lot, as I'm sure many other people had done. We spent a ton of time on Zillow looking for the right deal and ended up buying a property that had been listed and removed and relisted a few times. It needed a ton of updates and I had the time, so we pulled the trigger, made the renovations over the next couple years, and sold it for about 32% more than what we paid, about 54% ROI on our initial investment, including realtors' fees. We were stoked, to say the least. It worked out really well for only running numbers based on the price per foot on what was trending in town. But, the profit from that went to some debts and the down on a new house.
Sweet movie montage to a couple years later and I'm talking to a friend and we get on the topic of what we'd like to do, if we could. I said real estate investing. I told him about the flip my wife and I did and he said, "You should check out this website called Bigger Pockets." He says, "My uncle is all about it and he's putting all his extra money into buying rentals to plan for retirement." I'm pretty reluctant, partially due to a healthy skepticism and partially because my friend has a massive tendency to jump on bandwagons and get-rich-quick, pyramid scheme type deals. I don't check it out for a few months because I 100% assumed that it was some guru conference/financial bootcamp thing that you'd see an infomercial for. One day I thought to myself, "Self, it's just a podcast. What's the worst thing that can happen?" So, I decided to check BP out and I'm so glad I did! I've now listened to the podcast for over a year, almost every day and I have come to realize that I was really bad at being business-minded and I've thought like an employee for far too long. BP has really opened my mind to thinking like an investor. Example: my wife decided she thought a camper trailer was a good idea for road trips. So, I started thinking things like, how much is the cost, what are the soft costs like? Which led me to, how much would it cost and what would it take to open an RV park so we could both have a storage spot that pays us to park there and AirBNB the RV so it would pay us to own it.
Finding BP has really changed me into something better.
