My husband and I have always wanted to live on the beach. We are both teachers so we thought this was out of our possibilities, however, after 3 live in flips, we were able to build our dream house with our own private beach without getting a loan!! We also had enough left over to buy our first official rental house. We rented it out February 1st! Hoping that works out. We then took out a loan to purchase another rental that needs rehabbing. Plus it came with a second cottage on the same lot. We are working on that now!! We have our work cut out for us but fingers crossed!!!

Heck yeah! Good job to you and your husband! Keep up the hard work!

@Christy Philippoff congrats!!

I'm glad your hard work is paying off.  

@Christy Philippoff

That's wonderful!!  Your success is great.  For the benefit of the investor starting out would you please lay out a time frame, planning and savings plan for them. I am one that believes that real estate investing is a marathon and not a sprint.  I believe success does not happen over night.  

Thanks!!! 

@Charles Mitchell thank you!

@Kirby Davis thank you!!

@Theresa Harris thank you!!

@Christy Philippoff wow congrats! So awesome and it sounds like it’s just the beginning for you!

My wife and I are both teachers. The 9.5 month work schedule with 12 month pay + benefits is very conducive to real estate investing.

@Damaso Bautista I wouldn’t say we are too experienced! We still feel like we have no idea what we are doing. This is over the course of a little over 10 years. We probably could have done it sooner, but we both were going to graduate school at the same time. So the 10 years includes 4 graduate degrees and 2 kids. We also kept our full time jobs-teaching high school at first (and we both worked part time jobs at our local community college) so we could eventually transition to teaching college which we did as well. All that being said, if you don’t have so many extra things going on, I bet you could do it 10 times faster!!

@Matt Nusbaum thank you!!

@Max T. Absolutely!!

@Christy Philippoff

This is exactly what I was asking for.  Thanks again!!

How much did your beach house and rental house cost? You must have made incredible amounts on those flips!

@Damaso Bautista you’re very welcome!

@Don Gouge we made about 15k on the first one, about 100k on the second one and about 45k on the third one. Plus what we paid down on the loans when we were living in them. We did most

the work ourselves so we didn’t have the cost of contractors and we didn’t have to pay capital gains since we lived in them. Plus we are extremely cheap!! We were our own contractors when we built our beach house and did a lot of the work ourselves. Plus we are on the MS gulf coast so things don’t cost quite as much as other places!!! We were so excited when it appraised for 100k more than we have into it!!

@Christy Philippoff These were live in flips? How long did it take from the time you moved into the first flip to get where you are now? Congratulations on your success! Real estate investing is a powerful thing.

@Matt P. It took us about 10 years, but most people could go a lot faster. We did most of the work ourselves and we were both getting multiple graduate degrees and we had 2 kids. I’d imagine you could do it much faster than us!

That's amazing! Your hard work and planning is paying off.

That is so exciting to hear. I love hearing about others successes. It may have taken you both 10 years to do all of that; while most people take 10 years thinking about getting started. Cheers to the next 10 years. Much success to you both. 

"If you cant fly, then run. If you cant run; walk. If you cant walk; then crawl. But whatever you do, you have to keep moving forward."