18 Year Old Student (Cleveland, Ohio or West Palm, FL)
Hi! I'm pretty new to the forums, so I thought I'd introduce myself and see what happens. My names JT Marting, and I've been interested in F.I.R.E. community for a few years now. After spending a year or so learning how the stock market works, thinking that was the most successful vehicle of building wealth, I stumbled across Ben Mallah on youtube. After a brief but not very educational introduction to real estate through his channel, I decided to look into it a bit more. After doing some research, I was awestruck at the fact approximately 90% of millionaires are created by real estate. This fact alone made me decide to flip the script and now focus more of my time and effort into real estate. After getting bombarded by social media influencer scams, promising how their wholesaling course will turn me into a millionaire, someone in the comments suggested that people who were actually interested in taking real estate seriously listen to the Bigger Pockets podcasts. Perfect enough for me, I already listened to about 1-2 hours of podcasts a day, so it fit right in line with my routine. Now after getting a basic grasp on real estate, i'm 100% on board of sacrificing 5-10 years of my life to set myself up financially. As a high school senior, i've been competing in personal finance competitions for two years now, so I already understood the importance of money management and have a mediocre grasp on the financial side of real estate like building credit, taking out loans, and helocs. Now as I take the next step down my life, i've pondered my options other than just the traditional college path. Currently, I live in Cleveland Ohio, but defiantly want to go back to Florida, where I grew up and the majority of my extended family resides, for the next step in my life. Since I have to pay for all my college tuition myself, I'm considering everything. Currently I'm leaning towards moving down to West Palm and living with my grandparents as I take a gap year in attempt to build residency in Florida. This could easily save me $20,000-40,000. Instead of leaving college with approximately $40,000 in loans after all my scholarships, I could graduate with more like $10,000-20,000. In a perfect world, when I moved down to Florida I could find some job doing the busy work at a real estate agency or lender to learn the business, or maybe just someone I could learn from.
As a young adult now entering the world with a soldi work ethic and drive, I'm willing to do ANYTHING to get in the door. I will work so hard for anyone who's willing to take a step out of their comfort zone and work with a curious, intelligent young adult. Currently I have an internship at a widget manufacturing company and a job at a warehouse in hopes of building up as much money as I can, but as a young adult about to be stuck in the awkward phase between high school and college, I have no real commitments so i'm willing to drop everything in order to learn and potentially start my journey down the real estate path.
Honestly, I felt like the 5-10 minutes it'd take me to type this out might have a little bit of a chance of paying off with some sort of connection or at least tip from one of the many experienced real estate investors, agents, brokers, and other people in these forums. If you've made it this far, which I doubt many people, if anyone, has, feel free to reach out. Trust me, anything you could do or say to me at this point in my career would be super beneficial and could set me down the proper path! If there's anything you wish you knew at my age, or just suggestions you have, please reach out!