What a whirlwind of a month; hence my blogging absence. Pat started a new job one month ago, after working for CoBank for 10 years! Since then our lives have been hectic. While he’s now technically working from home, he has been out of town three of the last five weeks, which means I am double timing it. If you’re a single parent, you deserve daily accolades. It’s tough!
My office space is now our storage area in the basement, and when I actually make it down there, it’s quite nice sitting amongst the toilet paper, mac n’ cheese, toiletries, diapers and kids’ clothes. I also don’t have a window, so I’m constantly losing track of time. The other day I went to wake the girls from their naps; instead of the usual 4:30 p.m., it was 5:15!
When Pat and I started our real estate investing company toward the end of 2016 we never imagined it would lead to where we are today. The path we’re on is not what we expected or planned. We have learned so much over the past 2.5 years, and had we not taken that leap and challenged our mindsets we wouldn’t understand the depth of available opportunities.
Flip or Rent?
Our original goal was to start rehabbing distressed properties…become the next HGTV stars. 😉 We invested in a premiere real estate education program, drank the Kool-Aid and then drank through a firehose. We learned a ton and had enough education, coaches, mentors, and vendors in our network to be successful; however, the market in the Denver metro area was saturated with folks wanting to flip houses. The inexperienced investors were overpaying for anything and everything, and Pat and I weren’t willing to sacrifice our numbers to force a “deal” to work.
We turned to out-of-state, single family rental properties instead by leveraging my old 401K and Roth accounts and Pat’s old Navy account for two properties, and then used part of our Home Equity Line of Credit (HELOC) for another. The power of leverage is a wonderful thing, and once you start learning the possibilities you’ll want in the game too. Continue reading “Real Estate…Not As Easy As They Make it Out To Be”