A Year After ...

Wow, how time flies! I intentionally didn't post anything as our year was quite a whirl. Let's see, within a year we purchased 2 single family homes in Dallas, TX and 2 condos in Manteca, CA. Aside from these, we also own 2 condos in Las Vegas, NV and a lot in North Texas.

This is how we did this:

We moved to a bedroom community about 60 miles east of San Francisco in 2003. This was prior to the town's big boom. Fast forward to 2005, we had equity of about $100K in the home. We pulled out that equity and put it in the bank where it's earning a little bit of interest. We then started to look for real estate that we can invest in. We decided on Las Vegas as the place is still booming and we didn't really see any signs of it stopping any time soon with construction of casinos and other commercial properties going on all over the place. With that construction comes potential employment and migratory people looking for jobs. We settled on 2 condos: one on either end of Vegas.

At the same time, we were also looking at properties in Texas as this is one area that hasn't been hit by the speculative bubble. We saw an ad in craigslist for a 1/4 acre lot about 70 miles north of Dallas. We put in a call, did our due diligence and put in a reservation for a lot. This is in a country club community - with an 18-hole golf course and a lake. Nice eh?

Next we saw an ad for single family homes specifically being sold to investors. The homes can either be sold outright upon completion or rented out. Two things that were really good about that investment - only $2,000 down and the purchase price it 11% of the appraised value. It also has a very nice exposure to the rental market and the community has an HOA that would help in maintaining the community's look.

Finally, our realtor contact told us of a condo conversion a few minutes away from our place. We looked at it and the location's nice. We bought the lowest cost that has the fewest options as we're gonna rent them out anyway. The market price for the ones with options were about $30K more so for us, this was a no-brainer. We already know there's built-in equity based on the price of other similar units.

For all these deals we used conventional financing. So the 100K equity we took out enabled us to buy 7 properties in one year. That's quite an achievement! But, of course, an investment is not and investment if you lose money on it. Next time, I'll do the calculation for each property to figure out the ROI.

The Start Of Our Journey

Welcome! This blog seeks to impart the steps (or roadmap) we're taking to get to our financial freedom day. Join us as we embark on this path to financial independence and hopefully learn something with us along the way.

Our journey started a couple of years ago when we started reading Rich Dad Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki. That was quite an eye opener for us. Most of us were raised to become good employees - study hard, get good grades so you can get a good paying job with a good pension plan. Well, unless you've been living in a cave for the past couple of years, you would have realized that unless you're near the top of the food chain of many companies, your chances of getting rich is close to nil. Unless, of course, you happened to work for a Google-like company prior to the IPO. If so, count yourself lucky as many would struggle for years before they can afford to retire. After reading the book, we realized that we have to educate ourselves financially PDQ (pretty darn quick) if we didn't want to work until we're well into our 70's. We made the decision to dedicate a significant amount of our time to learn as much as we can about how to get ahead financially and the commitment to be financially free in 5 years or less.