My Story, from the flight line to full time

I made a really terrible gamble when I first graduated from college.

When I was 22 I graduated from the University of Oklahoma with a BA in Communication and more importantly a Commission into the United States Navy as an Ensign (O-1). After graduation, I left home and headed to Pensacola, FL for Flight School. I owned nothing but also didn’t need much to maintain my lifestyle. I had heard of friends getting a career starter loan, a loan for new Military Officers allowing them to get started in life or usually buy a car, but I had no need for it. My vehicle was passed down to me and I didn’t have any student loans (thankfully).

With my new-found freedom I began watching CNBC, reading books on the stock market, and started figuring out how I was going to get rich quick. The scheme I came up with was to take out a career starter loan (actually I took out two, which was technically against the rules, but I like finding holes in fine print) and invest it all in individually researched stocks. Now this was 2007. Interest rates for online savings accounts were 5%, the stock market had been on a run for a few years, and with a blended interest rate of 2.55% on the loans I couldn’t lose. I lost.

After investing the entire amount in 2007 I sat each day for the next two years watching my account continue to drop. I had picked solid companies based on research, some have soared today, but some also no longer exist. In all, my account never fully recovered. What didn’t decrease was the almost $1000 a month loan payment.

Now it’s time to clean up my mess and learn.

For the next few years I dutifully paid off my loan (a little early), learn to budget, and began investing in index funds with a much longer horizon. I also began to research real estate, because I had decided that I didn’t have enough control of stocks, that I couldn’t compete with billionaires, and honestly listening to earnings calls was not fun. After completing flight school, I was stationed in San Diego, CA, and real estate was still on my mind.

My wife and I decided that a 2-4-unit property would allow us to break into the San Diego market, and potentially allow us to live rent free. It took over a year, some great people, a 3% down FHA Loan, and God’s grace, but we were able to buy a 4 plex in an up and coming area in spring of 2010. Years later we would look back and realize we bought at the absolute bottom of the San Diego Market Cycle, in one of the best performing areas of town. Over the next three years we renovated all the units, hired and fired property managers, dealt with evictions, and realized we were making a lot of money. I also traveled all over the world flying Helicopters off ships and was away from home over 2 years. When we moved to back to Florida in 2013 we were clearing $1500 a month after all expenses on an original $30,000 investment.

Once in Florida I decided that real estate was a fun hobby and dabbled in wholesaling and buy and holds. It took another two years of playing around before I realized that there was real opportunity if I got serious and started treating real estate like a business. I also realized that I liked the scale of multi units, I wasn’t good at dealing with tenants, and that fewer people I knew were investing in commercial properties. I met a business partner when we both were bidding on the same mobile home park. We realized we had the same day job, our wives were already friends, that we went to church together and that we only lived two blocks from each other.

It’s time to take a hobby to a career.

In 2015 we buckled down, got education on commercial/multifamily properties and syndications, then applied what we learned. We put deals under contract then worried about the rest later. I decided to sell the 4 plex in San Diego when we learned we would not be going back to San Diego, in 6 years it had risen over 500k in value. Now this is completely an anomaly but I remind everyone that you can only find homeruns like this if you start playing the game. I also knew it was time to go to work and make that money work.

We had some misses, but every failed deal kept us moving to the next good deal. Eventually we bought a mobile home park. Then we syndicated a commercial building, and it wasn’t that hard. Then we syndicated a 60-unit apartment complex. A few months later we syndicated another apartment/condominium project. And yesterday we closed on another apartment. I also began private lending and investing passively in other Syndicator’s deals around the country. We were able to sell a deal and see huge returns for us and our investors. People started taking us seriously, we were making real money, and I was hooked.

By the middle of 2017 I realized that in only a few short years I had created enough sources of income that I no longer needed a full-time job after the Navy. In August of 2017 I finished my commitment, left the Navy and retired at 32 into a full-time real estate investor.

My Story Redux

• -Join the Navy, make boneheaded financial decisions in attempts to get rich quick, fail
• -Get smart on personal finance and learn to get rich slow, succeed
• -Learn about real estate, then act
• -Get serious about real estate, act some more
• -Leave the Navy and start living the rest of my story.