I will try to be brief.
Young dumb country boy, loved to read. Folks moved every few years. I fell in love with a girl in high school, folks moved again when I was a junior, I stayed and ended up living in my $75 car some of that time and off the kindness of good people who would give me work. Thought I would get rich started getting $3.50 an hour when my classmates were only making $2.00 an hour. After graduation I visited my folks in a boom town and got a job that day for $5.00 an hour. Left that for a $7.00 an hour job. My folks were borrowing money from me. Got another job, etc. ended up buying folks house that was about to be foreclosed on after they moved away. Sold house used money for junior college. Bought trailer house for take over payments, after I finished junior college I sold trailer and me and my wife moved to the university town where I bought a piece of land on contract for deed at 10% interest, a trailer house at 18% interest, and paid a guy to drill a well and put in septic. With 3 jobs I managed to get through college and start law school. Graduated from Law School but bad times hit, rented my trailer out and moved to Thermopolis and took a law job paying a third of what I earned in the oil fields 5 years before. Bought one of the 3 foreclosures on the block from the bank with payments less than rent. Had a guy asking for legal advice try to sell me his moms house for the amount of the federal tax lien on it. Also present was a real estate agent who was a contractor gone broke in the bust and starting over again with nothing. When the guy left I said I would love to buy it but have no money, he said same here, and his credit was shot. He had gone from business owner with 20 employees in the nicest house in town, to living in a trailer house and renting it. I said my credit is probably OK, and we decided to try to buy it together. Between the 2 of us we came up with about $1,200 and got a bank loan and bought it. He had some used carpet we put in it.
Eventually we sold it and bought more. Eventually the economy improved, he moved away and started another construction company. I bought him out of our real estate company for $300,000 three years ago. I am trying to buy him out of another company for about that same amount. We worked evenings and weekends fixing up junk properties, despite being more than a dozen years my senior he was tough as nails and could outwork guys half his age. I clearly learned more from him than he did from me.
This story is not complete without mentioning the girl I fell in love with in high school. While in college her parents forbid her from seeing me again. She climbed into my car and we drove away. She married me later and somehow I became the golden child later to her parents, but I think the grandchildren helped. She is not wild about my rentals and has opposed nearly every one I purchased, but we are over 30 doors and she does all the books as her degree is in business. You do not have to have money to get started. You need hard work, you need to save, you need to take some chances, you need the advice and even help of many kind people you meet along the way. You need to learn everything you can, some learning comes easy some comes at a cost. Do not forget however WHY you do it. I am already past the age that I planned to retire at. I could not retire on my rental income at this time, and any new purchases are more likely to benefit my children or grandchildren than myself, but I plan to keep growing. I would expect that the vast majority of folks out there could do what I did if they simply set goals and worked hard at them, most could probably do better. I got serious about real estate only 3 years ago. I dabbled for the last 20 years and it always made me money, but some of that was luck.
Bigger Pockets has played a large roll in my business. I found it as I was researching more information on real estate investing. I gained more knowledge on this site in three years than I did in my first 15 years of investing.
