This is the story of my journey to finding real estate deals—or rather, my journey to learning how crucial real estate deal finding is to solving the puzzle of becoming a successful real estate investor. The best way I know how to tell this is through a story, which starts with my first real estate deal.
An Early-Morning Anxiety Attack
Many people might not know this, but I did my first real estate deal 90 days after experiencing a panic attack. I had this panic attack in the middle of the night, triggered by the realization that the poor financial decisions I made as a single man were now negatively impacting my new wife. We couldn’t buy a home together because my credit was in such bad shape. I couldn’t even be on the loan for our house, and we almost missed out on our first home purchase because of my credit issues.
As I grappled with the fact that I couldn’t help purchase our first home, it dawned on me that many of our future dreams—like having kids, buying our dream house, living in a great school district, and going on vacations—were out of reach, given our financial situation. This realization led to a panic attack at 3 a.m.
Desperate for a solution, I began Googling ways to make extra money. This search led me to articles on BiggerPockets, where I saw that ordinary people were buying and owning real estate to build wealth.
My Plan of Action
At that moment, I made a decision: I would figure out how to be a successful real estate investor no matter what. Despite having bad credit (sub-600 score) and only $1,000 in my savings account, I…