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I'm a twenty year-old junior in college at the University of Maryland Baltimore County with a major in Information Systems. I am the youngest of four siblings, and my parents are in their sixties (I convinced my father to attend meetings at DCREIA with me; he also attended Dave Lindahl's 4 day Chunker/Foreclosure boot camp with me). No one in my immediate family owns more than one property currently except for my older brother Joseph. He is a real estate attorney in the Dayton, Ohio area and currently owns two houses. He used to own three apartment buildings for a total of 16 units, but he says the costs ended up higher than he believed, and he over calculated the cash flow on his properties. He was the property manager, and the properties did not cash flow enough to pay for one. I believe he owned the buildings for about four years and netted a profit of around $42,000. His job circumstances changed, and he figured his time was better spent working for his law firm (he had problems with tenants paying late, having to fix things, etc). Now my brother is very pessimistic and cynical about real estate. He tries to discourage me from getting started, because obviously if he couldn't become really successful (he was a valedictorian, went to Harvard, UPenn Law, etc), then I have little chance. My parents don't encourage my real estate passion, but they accept it.

I became interested in real estate probably around middle school when I learned of the landlord-tenant system. I wanted to own a piece of real estate (such as apartment buildings), rent it out, and allow my renters to pay down my mortgage and also give me a bit of extra payment each month in the form of positive cash flow. In early high school, I studied about paper assets, but I did not feel that paper assets are the most secure path to wealth. By junior year of high school, I had discovered Robert Kiyosaki, and I studied all of his materials I could find: Rich Dad Poor Dad, Cashflow Quadrant, Choose To Be Rich, Cashflow 101 and 202 games, and Rich Kid Poor Kid. Although his materials are very basic to most business people and investors, he encouraged a new way of thinking that differed from the ideas I had gained while young.

I needed more materials to study, so I searched on-line and found some good free sources of information. The source I used the most was creonline.com because of the vast amount of information available as well as the social community. I'm also on other sites such as biggerpockets.com, reiclub.com, and many more. One webinar from creonline.com I heard Dave Lindahl's presentation, and I felt compelled to purchase his Apartment House Riches course. I learned a lot from that course, and I've even had the opportunity to study additional courses from the Russ Whitney group, Ron Legrand, William Bronchik, Trump University, and more. I'm still in the process of completing some of those courses, but I have made substantial progress over the past few months. They cover topics including multi-family houses, pre-foreclosures, wholesaling, property management and cashflow, commercial real estate, tax liens and deeds, purchase options, and short sales. Eventually I would like to learn all about rehabbing.

My plan is to wholesale for a while, then rehab, then invest in multifamily houses and apartment buildings.

I work with a broker/owner of Dynamic Exit Realty in Maryland. The owner, Dante, owns a wholesaling company with several people working under him. I am working as a contractor for him, bringing him leads, calling sellers, etc. I'm not really a bird dog, cause I have a more intimate involvement in the deals. I'm pretty much doing all the work myself and just going to Dante for help. The idea is to get my feet wet under the supervision of an experienced investor. I met Dante at the April DCREIA meeting.