By 2009, the dust had settled: I sold my two restaurants at a massive loss but stopped the bleeding. Operations (and profits) stabilized on the other four locations. My life consisted of meeting with my operator once per week and counting the passive income that was comfortably covering my living expenses.
I had become financially free!

This allowed me to revisit my interest in real estate, and I decided I wanted to flip houses as a business. There was a huge supply of foreclosures, but at the same time, the retail market was recovering rapidly. This meant I could buy a house for $80K, put in $35K, and sell it for $185K. My original plan was to get back into apartment building investing, but this opportunity was too big to pass up.
My biggest problem was that I had no more money.

I had deployed my entire net worth into the restaurants 먹튀신고. I’m not complaining, because at the time, they were generating the passive income I had desired. There just wasn’t any cash left to invest in houses. I thought that perhaps I could convince some friends to invest. I proposed a $25K loan with 12% interest, and my father-in-law and brother-in-law were the first to bite. I then recruited a friend.
That’s when I had a huge AHA moment:

My ability to scale this business is only limited by my ability to find deals and raise money?not by my (lack of) financial resources.
Over the next three years, I raised a million dollars and flipped over thirty

houses. And I made good money, too.
But there was another problem: flipping houses was a TON of work!
I realized that if I wasn’t buying, fixing, or selling a house, I wasn’t going to make money. There was never any residual income after selling a house. It felt like a full-time job, and I was burning out. I then thought about building up a portfolio of single-family houses instead of flipping them. But then I discovered a second problem: I wasn’t going to be able to replace my income with single-family rentals.
One day I sat down at my kitchen counter and put pen to paper to try to figure out how many houses I would need to own to replace my income. My goal was $10,000 per month. I felt that if I bought right, I could get each rental to cash flow $200 per month. At that rate, I would need at least fifty houses in my portfolio.
Fifty rentals? How long would THAT take? A long time!
How much work would that be? A lot of work!
That’s when I remembered my apartment building training back in 2007, and I realized that investing in apartment buildings had several major advantages over single-family houses.