Buying ONE Rental Changed My Life: 4 Years Later, I Quit My Job

BiggerPockets Real Estate Podcast

BiggerPockets

Education, Business, Investing

4.8 • 16.5K Ratings

🗓️ 7 April 2025

⏱️ 38 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Just buy ONE rental property and watch your life change. Today’s guest was working multiple jobs, and a single property purchase allowed her to finally free up her weekends and regain some freedom in her life. The best part? She did it with just around $4,000, then repeated the process again and again, leading her to quit her demanding teaching job in just four years! Today, she’s describing exactly how she did it! Deandra McDonald called a lender, expecting to get a preapproval for a home. What actually happened? They told her, “No. Come back when you have more money, better credit, and less debt.” She hustled for two years, saving, working more, and paying off debt. She finally secured a loan for her first property, a two-bedroom townhouse that would change her life forever. Now, she’s a financially independent real estate investor, no longer tied to her teaching job, and investing in completely overlooked “rental properties” that produce killer returns and allow her to live job-free. These properties are still largely ignored, but Deandra says it’s not too late to take advantage of them and escape your W2 job, too! In This Episode We Cover: How getting just one rental property can lead you to financial freedom in under a decade Why you CAN NOT give up when a lender tells you “no” for a home purchase The overlooked rental properties that you can buy at a MAJOR discount Why Deandra wants to pay off her mortgages instead of scaling to a huge unit count The easiest way to start investing in real estate that requires the least money possible And So Much More! Links from the Show Join BiggerPockets for FREE Let Us Know What You Thought of the Show! Ask Your Question on the BiggerPockets Forums BiggerPockets YouTube Apply to Be a BiggerPockets Real Estate Guest Try REsimpli, The Only All-In-One Real Estate Investor CRM Software That Helps You Manage Data, Marketing, Sales, and Operations Grab the Personal Finance Classic, “Rich Dad Poor Dad” Sign Up for the BiggerPockets Real Estate Newsletter Find Investor-Friendly Lenders A Better Retirement After Buying Just ONE Rental (and Never FOMO-ing) Connect with Deandra Connect with Dave Check out more resources from this show on BiggerPockets.com and https://www.biggerpockets.com/blog/real-estate-1105 Interested in learning more about today’s sponsors or becoming a BiggerPockets partner yourself? Email [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Just buy one house.
0:02.5	That's really all it takes to start your real estate investing journey and potentially change
0:06.5	your entire life.
0:08.2	Today's guest bought her first home with just $4,000 in cash, and she lived there with
0:13.1	roommates to offset her mortgage costs.
0:15.7	Then within five years, she had acquired a 10-unit apartment building and had left her
0:20.7	teaching job to pursue
0:22.0	real estate full-time.
0:28.2	What's up, everyone? It's Dave Meyer, head of real estate investing here at Bigger Pockets.
0:33.4	And today on the Bigger Pockets podcast, we have an investor story featuring DeAndra McDonald.
0:39.1	DeAndra is going to tell us about her real estate investing career in central Virginia,
0:43.8	which started with just a single $85,000 house and has grown steadily into a truly life-changing
0:50.7	portfolio.
0:51.8	We're going to talk about the steps she took to get her finances
0:55.0	in order after she got a hard no from the first lender she approached, how she leveled up to
1:01.0	larger properties by converting a motel, and why she's not actually looking to grow her portfolio
1:06.7	any larger than its current size. This conversation is, to me at least, a great example of the
1:12.9	persistence and patience it takes to build a great real estate portfolio and how your first step
1:19.2	towards financial freedom is often the most important one. Let's bring on DeAndra.
1:24.9	DeAndra, welcome to the Bigger Pockets podcast. Thanks so much for being here.
1:28.9	Absolutely. This is really, really exciting. As someone who, for their first property,
1:33.3	12 years ago, signed up for Bigger Pockets, hoping to learn. This is like, this full circle moment
	...

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