Hello everyone in BP land! My name is Jacques!

I apologize for not having a profile picture up yet. I made this account in kind of a hurry a few weeks ago and recently decided to download the app to check it out from my phone. Unfortunately I haven’t found a way to do any editing of my profile from the mobile app.

ANYWAYS! As I said, my name is Jacques. I’m 23 years old, born and raised in Albuquerque, New Mexico. We’re known for Breaking Bad, the Balloon Fiesta, and our crime rates.

I came across Bigger Pockets a few weeks ago when I decided to start looking into real estate investing a little more seriously. I found the podcast and have so far listened to about 30 episodes and am truly pumped to get into this industry!

I have a few reasons for wanting to invest in real estate;
Firstly, the thought of financial freedom has been something that I’ve been striving to achieve since I first heard about it. Real estate, from everything that I’ve read, seems like a great catalyst to do so. (I’m not too sure if that’s the correct use of the word catalyst, but it’s the word that came to mind.)
Secondly, I’ve always wanted to find a form of income that would allow me to work while being around my family as much as possible. I have a 1 year old that seriously gets bigger everyday. Being able to actually be with her and watch as she grows is huge to me. Not to say that this isn’t possible with a 9 to 5, but in my line of work (welding) I’m usually pretty tired after work and just want to sleep. A 2 hour commute to work each way doesn’t really help too much either.
There’s plenty of other reasons why, but one of the biggest has to be that I love working both in an office setting and “out in the field.” I’ve had trouble in the past really finding anything that I’m passionate about, but the few times that I’ve helped people with doing renos or new constructions I’ve been amazed at how much I enjoy it. Being able to work on plans and dealing with administrative things like building permits, then going out and doing the actual work. I imagine it’s probably because I haven’t had to deal with the major headaches that can present themselves, but for the fore mentioned reasons I believe it’d be more than worth doing.

If you’ve gotten this far, I commend you and you definitely deserve some kind of cookie or something. As for what I’m looking to do, along with my fiancé we hope to do a few flips, find a few investment properties, and ultimately get a nice piece of commercial property. Somewhere along the line I’d like to do what Brandon Turner did and get a property for my daughter to pay for her college.

I hope to find a mentor in my area willing to teach me as I’m eager to learn any and everything I can about this business.
Thank you all for your time and devotion to reading the life story I’ve written above. I hope you all have an awesome rest of your weekend!

-Jacques

Hi @Jacques Chevrier

Welcome to BP! We're so excited you're here and making connections. Check out the nearby members and network at https://www.biggerpockets.com/meet, it will help you a lot to find partners that can help you out in investing.

Hopefully we can help each other out in the future. Best of luck to you! :)

@Trexie E. thank you, ma'am!

@Jacques Chevrier

Welcome to BP!  As far as getting familiar with investing in our area, a good start is attending Investor meetings. There are quite a few monthly meetings around here!

Check Meet-up dot com for a list, although there are other groups not found on that site.  Get to know some local investors and learn from the presentations too!

I have only attended ABQREIA and ACRE regularly, so can’t speak to any of the others.

Hope to see you at one of them soon.

@Lydia S thank you so much! I definitely will be looking into them!

Hello @Jacques Chevrier   

I am glad you found bigger pockets as I recommend it to everyone I meet. You'll find the Albuquerque investor community is very friendly and easy to get assistance on questions or advice, just as the bigger pockets investors are. I have been to a lot of the meetup meetings here in town and there are some good ones for beginners, depending on your goals. Feel free to contact me and I'll pass on whatever knowledge I can to you. 

-Bruce

Welcome to BP the learning never ends, keep reading, keep motivated, and keep investing.

@Bruce Ellerd thanks! I'm really glad to hear it. I've been putting off doing anything really because I'm just honestly pretty intimidated by real estate investing as a whole. I lost a good amount of money in recent years to trading foreign exchange and it still looms over me. I hope to learn as much as possible here and I definitely will be taking you up on that! I hope to see you and @Lydia S. at a meeting sometime!