Good morning all. I'm new to real estate but not really. I started getting involved about three months ago so I still consider myself new but I wanted to share with you and see if anyone else was in the same boat. Here's what happened:
Over this past year I had some major life changes and in July I wanted to make some changes. So I started listening to podcasts to learn how to make money, specifically the "MAD Fientist" podcast. Meanwhile I was also reading books about money because I knew I needed changes and wanted financial freedom. In my learning about money and researching people who had money, I found that many wealthy, financially free people had one thing in common - Real estate. I thought, it makes sense, I own a house I understand the value, I enjoy watching HGTV and I helped my dad renovate his personal homes when I was a little girl (I mostly did painting and cleaning ;-). Since I always enjoyed painting homes and owning homes I thought I will look into real estate investing.
Unfortunately in my research I ran into the real estate gurus, I signed up went to one of the weekend training events (which I had to pay for) and was all pumped up until they said,"the next level of training is $20,000". I was sooooooo mad, I already spent like $3k for this weekend training which is hard to come by and now they're asking me for $20K. If I had $20K I would already be purchasing a home. So I started looking for less expensive alternatives. Meanwhile, I'm still listening to MAD Fientist and these guys from "Bigger Pockets" get interviewed and I am intrigued. I think, let me look into this. I finish my weekend guru training, say thank you and no thank you and I start looking into Bigger Pockets. I also started listening to "Bigger Pockets" Podcasts.
I thought I new what I was going to do, since the gurus taught how easy it was to make $5K wholesaling a house. I was like this is what I'm going to do. The reason I thought wholesaling is because I need to replace my income in the next few years because of medical challenges I've been dealing with. I thought wholesaling sounds super easy, no money needed to get involved and easy work so if or when I have the pain again and am stuck in bed taking 2 weeks off work won't hurt me. I was so wrong. I am grateful that the Bigger Pockets podcasts are so informative. I learned that wholesaling is not easy, actually nothing about real estate is easy and there are so many different avenues to get involved and so many ways to make money and possibilities of starting with money down and options to start with no money down. I basically became overwhelmed with the real estate options, but I kept listening. There were so many times this one piece of advice helped me to finally choose, " focus". There are a lot of ways to get distracted, a lot of bad information out in the world, and a lot of scam artist trying to rip off real estate newbies, so focus and pick one thing, learn about that one thing and get started. So that's what I am doing now.
I have finally decided to invest in buy and hold rentals. I really seem to be pulled in that direction so in that decision here's what I have done in the past 3 months on my real estate journey.
- I've listened to every single 2013 Bigger Pockets podcasts (free real estate education)
- I've improved my credit score from 631 to 651 (good credit helps with getting leverage, I didn't realize my score was so low :-0)
- I've became a member of Bigger Pockets (networking and more learning)
- I've signed up for Bigger Pockets Pro (affordable expert training and access to more resources than I could ever think of)
- I've watched a few of the educational videos on getting started (want to and have so much more to learn)
and I've started looking for contractors by hiring them to do work in my own home so when I'm ready to hire someone for my rentals I'll know who is good or not so good.
In the next few months, I plan on:
- Reading the Bigger Pockets "Ultimate Beginners Guide to Real Estate Investing", (had to finish reading "You are a Badass at Making Money" )
- Increase my credit score to 660s or higher (want to get to 700s before I do any bank/loan research)
- Really learn about buy and hold investing and being a landlord (again I have much to learn)
- and Spend more time on BP (no explanation needed)
I will let you know how it goes.
Sorry for the long post but I really wanted to share and hope you all will share beginning experience with me as well. Thanks for reading.
Valerie Lopez
