The Day I Decided I Was Going To Get Rich Was March 8th, 2013
I remember it was a Friday, and I was meeting some friends for lunch. We always went to this restaurant during Lent, because they sold fish tacos half price. It was something about being able to eat fish on Fridays before Easter. After we pounded down some grub, we started talking about businesses and money, I casually said to my newly found friend who had just moved to Houston, “Man, I’d love to get into real estate someday.” He just looked at me, and with the biggest grin on his face he replied, “Let’s do it, man.” I was a little surprised at his response but excited at the same time. Hesitant to get in real estate by myself because I had never done it. I was genuinely afraid of failure and the unknown.
I quickly learned that my friend, who I will call “D” from now on had built a sizable real estate portfolio of homes in the town where he went to graduate school, and now that we lived in Houston, he wanted to start over and do it again. So that day I, “D,” and three others that were at lunch formed a company. We decided to dive into real estate and to start down the part of Financial Independence!
Since that pivotal taco day, I’ve now bought and sold scores of homes and increased my net worth to way over a million dollars. I started out knowing absolutely nothing about houses but five years later now manage a portfolio of over 50 single-family houses.
Background
Here’s some background so you can see we are pretty regular dudes. We love listening to podcasts and reading personal finance blogs. Some of our inspirations are Mister Money Mustache, Bigger Pockets, and ChooseFI. I work in IT, and I live in the suburbs of Houston, and I’m in my mid-thirties. My wife is a full-time mom to our four kids. So all those stories of dual-income couples with no kids or 1 kid, well that’s not my story nor my partners as he has three kids and a stay-at-home wife. I tell you this because I want people to know its possible to reach FI, even on one income and with a bunch of kids in tow.
In 2013 I was making probably 85k, and now in 2018, I probably gross about 175k in my day job. However, my most significant jumps in net worth are all due to real estate. I used to “play” in the stock market, but I quickly learned that I had limited information as a stay at home investor and that I always missed the real action in after-hours trading. I’m a firm believer in index investing, and I know it works. It can make one wealthy, but I wanted something better, something quicker. I found that in real estate. It’s the place I saw where you could control most of the variables and therefore improve the outcome: the property, the improvements, the tenant, its all controlled by the owner. Plus, you can buy property with leverage thus amplifying your returns. This knowledge was a game changer for me. Back in the day, I would have never traded on margin (borrowing money to buy/sell stocks), but now every rental property I have now has some leverage associated with it, and I still sleep fine at night.
Think Different
I also consider myself kinda a weirdo; different than all the “chasers” that seem to surround me. A “chaser,” as I define it, is somebody who is always looking for the next step up in the lifestyle and doing everything to push their spending to edge, often to crazy levels of debt to keep up with the “Joneses.” Boats, cars, fancy vacations, expensive coffee, all these things are the antithesis of net-worth, and that’s all I every track. It’s the single most important financial metric to me: NET WORTH. The famous quote, “That which is measured, gets managed,” could not be more true. We measure net-worth, so that’s what we aim to increase at all times. You will see here through our journey that real estate can drastically increase net-worth if purchased correctly and managed efficiently.
In this blog we are going to chronicle our journey, talking about each property we purchased, crazy tenant stories, wild transactions and throw in some life-hacks in for good measure — all the while tracking the most important number for us, net-worth. We will also share all the mistakes we made along the way in hopes that others can learn from what we did wrong. We hope you’ll enjoy our story! Check out
