Newbie from Durham, North Carolina currently living in KSA

[Rajaa Shakir]

Hi,

I'm Rajaa. Originally from Philadelphia, PA, but my family last lived in Durham, NC when we were in the states. I'm a homeschooling mom married to a GP Physician. My only experience in investing comes from an accidental flip that I did with my husband when we first got married. He gutted a house in Camden, NJ where we planned to live then we decided to sell it to get money for him to go to medical school.

My husband and I are still trying to clarify our goals for investing. We are interested in real estate as a replacement for a 401K or other traditional retirement investment. 

Ideally, real estate would allow us to do the following:

Short Term (10-20 years): 

Learn as much as we can and find an investing strategy/system that fits well with our lifestyle.

Allow our savings to grow with good rates of return.

Long Term: 

Build a business that we can transfer to our children and create generational wealth.

We found BiggerPockets in 2014 and were doing a lot of research, but then we got sidetracked by some other business ideas. Now we're back in the learning phase and trying to decide where to start investing. The current goal is to just spend the next year learning, saving, and networking.  Hopefully, this time next year we will have $100k in capital to invest in our first deal and enough partners to make it successful.

After listening to a lot of beginner podcasts, I've realized that we need to decide on a focus for our investing, so that's probably our first big step. We have a few limiting factors:

1) We would prefer to continue to live abroad, so we aren't sure if we should invest in the US or look into international markets. There seem to be lots of pros and cons to both. We're primarily interested in the Middle East/Turkey and rules and regulations aren't always consistent.

2) We don't use interest for religious reasons, so we will be using our own cash or working with partners. I'm interested in crowdfunded options, but I realize that's kind of a "training wheels" approach and I think at this point, we need to get some more experience under our belts.

3) Some of the money we are using is for our kid's college/career funds so we need to have enough cash on hand that we can give them the money in 10-15 years.

4) We are wondering if we should just stack cash with all of the bullish takes on the current economy. It seems like there will be a lot more deals in the coming years, but without experience, we may not be able to take advantage of them. We are interested in investing in the Raleigh/Durham market, which is pretty high right now.

Most likely, we'll try to find a partner who can help us do a few flips just in neighboring cities and then try to refine our plans from there.

Nice to meet you all. Looking forward to learning more and connecting.