Ten true stories
Ten Extraordinary Stories of People from Different Walks of Life, Who Discovered Financial Freedom Through Apartment Investing
by David Lindahl · Interviews by Jonathan Rozek · RE Mentor, 2021
That's the sentence I heard more than any other in twenty-two years of teaching. Too old. Not a numbers person. Not enough money. Every good deal gets taken before a beginner sees it.
Some of that is true for some people. But I kept watching people start from worse places than the ones they were describing, and get there anyway.
So I picked ten of them. I didn't interview them myself — I asked Jonathan Rozek to, told him to ask whatever he wanted, and stayed out of the edit. What came back doesn't sugar-coat anything. The work, the waiting, the deals that went sideways. It's all in there.
They don't look like each other. That was the point.
Homeless and addicted in 1999. Sober since November 22nd of that year.
Read Rob's story →Missouri to California. A retail buyer who ended up at Levi's — then went looking for something that would outlast a career.
Read Jeanne and Chip's story →Venezuela, then Panama, then the U.S. in 2011. Her biggest barrier was the language.
Read Vanessa's story →It started when her son's store closed and he moved back home.
Read Cyndee's story →A blue-collar family that worked the line in Detroit, where career advancement meant becoming a forklift operator.
Read Mark's story →Raised on a farm in Dewey, Oklahoma. A degree in vocal performance, then years teaching music and working in church ministry.
Read Cynthia and David's story →Eight people in a one-bedroom apartment in India. No television, no telephone, no refrigerator. School was held in a tent.
Read Vinney's story →Niles, Michigan — a town of about 12,000 people, then and now.
Read Daniel's story →Aunt and nephew. A football coach's daughter who had no idea her parents were broke, because the house was full of love.
Read Kim and Chad's story →She got out of a violent marriage with two small children, lived in her car for a while, and went back to school — where she earned her first 4.0.
Read Donna's story →Plenty has been written about the mechanics of apartment deals. Very little has been written about how it actually goes for people with different jobs, different savings, different ages and different amounts of nerve.
If you've been reading about this and quietly wondering whether it could work for someone in your position, one of these ten probably started closer to where you are than you'd guess.
Ten Paths · David Lindahl · Interviews by Jonathan Rozek · RE Mentor, Inc., 2021 · 245 pages · ISBN 978-0-578-25535-4
David Lindahl is a real estate investor and author with more than 30 years in multifamily and commercial property. He is the author of Multi-Family Millions and other books on apartment investing, and taught investors for twenty-two years through RE Mentor. All books by David Lindahl →