Fort Wayne to Chicago

(July 5th, 2022) This is sort of a guest post. Tyler wrote some stuff down for June in a letter, but it didn't really include all his photos, so you get some of his words and then pictures I grabbed from his phone.

"This last week, I went to Fort Wayne, Indiana with Aric. We were there to meet people and look at property. I've been working my tail off to understand investing, and I have found that with everything I do in my life that is worth it, I have to jump in and wade around for a while. I'll figure things out, but I'm hands on — it's hard for me to learn it from a book. Believe me, I wish I could learn things from a book better than I do. 

Aric and I met a lot of great people out there, and we learned a lot while we were out there. It culminated in a purchase of a duplex. Yup, I bought another house. I want to do more house buying, so I have to figure out where I'm going to get more money. I can only buy so many properties on the salary that I have. Haha. However, I think I've figured something out — and I wish I would have figured it out when I was your age.

I have figured out that it doesn't take that much money to buy millions of dollars in real estate. Everyone thinks you have to have millions of dollars, but that's not correct. I learned that you can buy a house with just 20% down and get the full benefit of the property. The bank will loan you the rest. So, I can buy a $100,000 house with just $20,000. Or, I can buy a $500,000 property with just $100,000. You get rent for the full asset, but you only have to put $1 in $5 down to get the property."

There was more stuff about financing, but I'm not going to put it all in here. (Sorry kids, one day you will read this and wonder what all the secrets are. I hope your dad is still around to tell you.) Let's look at a few pictures from the trip.

I really love the pictures of the buildings going up into the clouds. This next picture was the only one Tyler sent in his letter, so it had a caption. 

"Chicago, at "The Bean". We flew out of Chicago, so we had to see this sculpture. We also got some straight-up Chicago deep dish pizza. It was pretty amazing. Btw, the people I helped sell their house — the people that went to Kiev Ukraine with me — they're moving to the Chicago area. We had pizza with Jason, who had traveled out ahead of the family to get started with work."

Then just a couple more. I believe Ginos East was the deep dish pizza place? Every inch of that place was signed. Pretty cool, although I think it would make it hard to clean anything. You wouldn't want to wash off signatures.

Tyler was only gone a few days, but we missed him a lot. He got home right before we all left for Girls Camp. So at least he had a quiet house to recuperate in.