Rick, you and I can not control a stock market, it is more of a gamble... when you invest in stocks you hope and pray it will go up...

I have been on this platform a few years and have made some great connections here and I am sure you will.

I started by buying a few NPLs and doing the workouts and that forced me to create a platform to repeat the process on latter acquisitions.

I personally think Airbnb has hands down the best platform of the 3 and their mobile app is kick butt compared to the other 2.

Here's the top 5 I'd recommend: (in no particular order)Who Moved My Cheese - Spencer Johnson (deals with change)How to Win Friends and Influence People - Dale Carnegie (One of the best sales books)Secrets of Closing the Sale - Zig Ziglar (Another top sales book)Guerilla Marketing - Jay Conrad Levinson (One of the best marketing books)Platform - Michael Hyatt (About how to use social media)

You can go to community icon on the top left of the page and go to networking events and type in "Spokane" for example and it should give you the following link: https://www.biggerpockets.com/forums/521-events-an...if you don't see anything current reach out to some of the BP members that have used this platform for their meet-ups in the past and I am sure they would be more than happy to add you to an email contact list when they plan on having another.  

You're working on a 30% margin and have about 15% in hard costs so when you pay extra points on money costs you dont have much room for error on those smaller ones.Might could find a private lender, you'd be surprised how many people have that kind of money laying around in cash equivalent assets.Bank isn't really an option unless you are using other collateral like a HELOC on your home's equity or something.I haven't tried ground floor or any of the other crowd funding platforms, but there's an ad for it on my screen as I'm typing this and my understanding is they've come a long way since I talked to them at launch.

If we could find this all in one program that is easy to use and online that would be great, but not sure if that is out there.From my reading a looking a a few so far it seems like Rentec Direct and Xero Accounting are both well thought of platforms.

Your friend is correct you will find tons of information and have a platform to connect with other like minded individuals at various levels in their investment knowledge and expertise.

So to sum it up, you took a gamble to score big, and you won.