A lot of people ask me how to get started in real estate. I don't claim to be a real estate expert, but I can tell how I got started and maybe it will mean something to you.
Four years prior to graduating from college, we were live-in housekeepers for a wealthy family in an upscale neighborhood in Provo, UT. We went to the local church and I became good freinds with a man named Rob. He invited us over to their modest home (6,000 sq.ft. was modest for this neighborhood) several times. We would also go up to their cabin and we spent a lot of time together. I guess I thought he was wealthy, but it never occured to me how wealthy he was until another gentlemen from the church was talking to me about the wealthy people in the congregation. He was by far the richest man in the area (very wealthy). So the next time we got together with Rob and his family, I asked him how he became successful. He told me about how he would buy a property, live in half of it and rent out the other half. He did this with two or three houses, until he had enough cash flow to start buying single family homes, living in them for a year or two and then renting them out. Over and over again. "I have never worked from 9 to 5," he told me. That was something that stuck with me.
Right out of college we were broke. We had two kids, $30,000+ in school loans, a car, and some credit card debt. We lived in a small 2 bedroom apartment, and we were barely making the $700 rent. I remember not knowing how we where going to make the next months rent. Chelsey and I were always looking in real estate magazines for our "dream house," but that was depressing because we couldn't qualify for much of a loan. To us buying was out of the question because almost anything worth living in was more than $700/month in a mortgage payment. Then we found a nice little brick rambler with a mother-in-law apartment. We were able to get our mortgage down to about $1,000, and we rented the apartment for $450 per month. All of the sudden we had lowered our monthly housing cost to only $550. We were convinced.
