Who am I and why am I writing about real estate investments?

Nice to meet you and thanks for checking this out!  

My name is Andrew Luong and at the age of 23, I’ve been able to acquire 6 rental properties in Sacramento, CA and Houston, TX (and counting), perform fix-and-flips, all while holding a full-time job.  Over the years, I’ve become a big proponent of real estate investing when looking to build long-term wealth.  Today I decided I wanted to share my journey and learnings with others so you could find the inspiration to do the same.

Who am I?

For you to better understand my journey, I want to go over some highlights about myself.

My career began in technology sales about 4 years ago at a consumer electronics startup based out of the Silicon Valley.  As I began to amass a small savings, I realized I wanted to invest but wasn’t quite sure where and how.  Personal finance quickly became a passion of mine.  I started by leveraging credit card bonuses, bank account signups, etc and then realized that, for myself, this would quickly cap out.  Like many looking to invest, I quickly turned to the traditional investment vehicles: savings accounts, CDs, bonds, stocks, mutuals funds etc.  The former few (savings accounts, CDs, bonds) produced lackluster returns and the later proved to be volatile and I, quite frankly, felt like I didn’t have the necessary resources and time to create consistent and high yields.  Then I stumbled across real estate.

Why real estate?

Based on the reasons mentioned above, I was unsatisfied with other investment vehicles and kept researching.  Eventually, due to a combination of persistence and luck (persistence in that I didn’t give up looking and luck in that I found out my cousin had began recently as well), I found real estate.

At the time, all I knew was that I loved my career in technology sales (I still do!) but I also wanted a vehicle that enabled me to continue my career, produce good returns, and was interesting to pursue.  Real estate became my answer to this.

What exactly do I do?

The term real estate is a very general term and could be broken down into many categories and subcategories (rental homes, fix-and-flips, commercial real estate, tax liens, hard money lending, etc – the list goes on and on).  So what do I do exactly?

I’m a Realtor, mortgage loan officer, fix-and-flipper, and rental home owner.  My bread-and-butter here is the rental home investments.  Specifically, I seek to purchase cash-flowing rental properties with built-in equity to produce “passive” income.  In normal people terms, what I mean by this is that I look to buy rental properties that produce a cash-flow after taking into account mortgage, tax, insurance, and expenses.  Additionally, five key reasons why I love real estate investments:

• Cash flow
• Equity capture
• Equity build-up
• Appreciation
• Tax benefits

With this is mind, I wanted to create Ten by Thirty to share my successes, challenges, and all I have/will learn in order to empower others to do the same.

What is Ten by Thirty?

I’ve always big proponent of setting goals – both large and small (might be due to the goal-oriented nature of sales quotas and metrics) and ten by thirty was one of my first goals when getting into real estate.

As I purchase my first rental property at the age of 20, I had set a, seemingly aggressive, goal of purchasing one rental property per year until I reached the age of 30.  Based on my original and rough calculations, I would make ~$400 per home and multiplying that by 10 would produce enough income for me to be financially free based on real estate alone.

Three years into the journey, I’m ahead of my original goal and have also begun setting different and more aggressive goals (more on my specific goals in a later post!) but this idea is one that I still think about often.

So there we are, this is why I created Ten by Thirty – ready to begin this journey with me?

-Andrew