Simon Delony

I have been working professionally as a self-employed contractor for 25+ years in the Maritime Industry. As much as I enjoy what I do, there is very little stability and no benefits (medical, retirement, etc.) that come with it. My wife works in the education system and is able to provide the medical and has retirement. My wife and I recently sold our home and made a good profit (we were adding/making improvements every year and doing as much of the work as we could). We are wanting to become real estate investors and use this money to set up long term rentals to finally establish an income to use for retirement. We want to achieve this over the next 10 years. Our goal is to purchase 2 properties in 2025 and possibly some land to get our toe's wet and see how it goes. We feel we are in a good starting place as we do have the down payments and also any reserves needed to get started, we just don't have the experience and knowledge. I have already started listening to Podcasts (3 today so far). I started reading Brandon Turner's "Rental Property Investing" book yesterday. We met with our Accountant last Friday to discuss our plan and get his recommendations on how to start correctly with accounting and if an LLC is needed. We will be going to our bank this Friday to start the loan "pre-approval" process. At this time I do not foresee us managing any properties for another 2-3 years until we can free up some of our time. I am also looking in to adding two different area's that are related to my profession to expand my income earning potential and to be able to be more time independent. I was a Carpenter and still love to work on home projects. In 2-3 years we are hoping to buy, live in it for a year or so, fix it up, and then either sell it or add it to our rental portfolio. This excites us both. It will give us the opportunity to move to different locations and explore the area (to see if that is an area we would like to retire in), while working towards our end of goal of financial freedom.