07/13/2025
THIS IS WHERE IT ALL STARTED! Today I drove by this house and was struck by nostalgia❤️. In 2004 Joy and I, in our 20’s stepped out and bought this home with my brother in a quaint neighborhood in Long Beach’s East Side near El Dorado Park. With a $10,000 loan from our Mom and my brother’s life savings of $5,000 we had just enough money to pay the closing costs on a zero down mortgage and get the keys to our very own home with guest house. This is the place where I began to love real estate and seriously learn the inner workings of investing, management, repairs, finance, and all the rest. We have deep forever memories here of hosting bible studies, celebrating graduations, hosting young marrieds’ events, and ultimately setting it up as our very first rental property.
This house was a great gift for many reasons, but as most of life works, the great gifts are often after-products of great trials. We had this property and one other during the 2008 Great Recession. Caused by loose lending practices and unethical loan brokering, this was the lesson of a lifetime! Upside down on two properties with friends and business affiliates giving back their houses to the banks to get out from under the crushing weight of ever rising mortgage payments. Even my loan broker gave his rental property back to the banks. Housing prices collapsed overnight causing banks to freeze all kinds of lending with many banks going insolvent within just months. Unemployment rocketed to very near Great Depression levels and every home on the market was either a short-sale or a bank owned property. What a time to be a brand new real estate investor, my word!!! No money, no equity, and no hope of becoming a real estate guru. We ended up choosing to keep both properties and make the mortgage payments whether we had tenants or not, an at-the-time very unpopular choice.
Fast forwarding, we held this property for 16 years and in 2020 were honored to be able to sell it to our long-term tenants and help launch their journey into real estate investing; I’m proud of you, boys.
I feel very blessed and grateful to be able to walk down memory lane without regret and share a little bit about our life and the events that shaped us. Thanks for reading!
