What actually happens if you buy a rental property with zero dollars down and hold it for over two decades?

That's exactly what I did with my first rental property 22 years ago.

Since then, I bought dozens of rental properties, but that very first one taught me some of the most important lessons about real estate investing.

Because after owning it for 22 years, the results were not exactly what I expected, especially with the cash flow. So in this episode,

I'm going to show you exactly what happened with that deal, including all of the numbers

and my key takeaways. And in case you're curious, after owning the property for 22 years, it's produced about $41,300

in cash flow.

Using the tenant's rent, I've paid off about $38,000 of the original loan.

And the property is now roughly worth $244,000 after buying it originally for $95,000.

But those final numbers don't tell the real story because the early years of this investment were pretty rough. So let's go back to the beginning. Back in 2004, I bought a three-year-old, simple three-bedroom house and Easley, South Carolina. Easley is in the upstate of South Carolina, very close to Greenville, which is a beautiful small city and also the headquarters of BMW and Michelin North America.

But just two years earlier, I had graduated from Clemson University.

And although I didn't have any personal debt, thanks to a football scholarship, I was very

short on cash. And I didn't have a regular job or income because I was trying to be a full-time

real estate investor. So in order to buy this first rental property, I had to be

scrappy and creative financially. Here's what the numbers look like when I bought it. The price

actually paid for this property was $94,050. And at that time, I was out looking for properties doing

different things. I actually put signs out that said, I buy houses. And I got a call from a seller. And they

were interested in selling it

because they had two houses they were making payments on. They had recently gotten married.

This is the property that was sitting vacant. And they didn't like the fact they were making

payments on it. So we discussed the property. And we ended up making a deal where I took over payments

on their existing mortgage. This is a deal structure called buying subject to the mortgage.

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