Let’s run the numbers
I bought my first condo for cash. I had about 80K in the stock market and sold it to pay cash for my condo. This was around 1997 and bought the condo for somewhere around 60K. In in May of 2000, I sold it for 62K and a 3 bd 1ba house in Vergennes VT for 94K in June of 2000.  As mentioned, I started house hacking by finishing a basement room and renting out the three bedroom house. This covered my mortgage for the two years that I owned that house. I sold it in June of 2002 for 114.2K and bought the duplex for 129K in June or July of 2002. Again, I house hacked by living in one side and renting the other side to a retired electrician. The duplex needed a roof and full electrical rewiring among other things.
I let the renter stay for free for the first year and he and I rehabbed the duplex. I did all this while working on my associates degree and working a full time job. In 2004, I moved to Florida for work and kept the condo in Vermont. I bought a condo in Florida that rose in price during the 1.5 years that I lived there. The market had started to decline in Florida and barely got out of there with a 40k profit. Another job move brought me to DC. I bought a condo in Maryland just before the bubble burst in 2007-2008.  I paid 179K and it has never recovered. It is now my second rental because my wife and I bought a house.
Fast forward to late 2017 and my friend Dr. Waithe told me about Bigger Pockets. From 2002 to 2017, I took a break from investment properties to focus on college and get a Ph.D.
I was listening to Dave Ramsey podcasts and then stumbled across the Bigger Pockets podcast in early 2018. I was new to podcasts so it took me a couple months to start listening to the Bigger Pockets podcast. I started with show number 1 and by show 5, I was hooked. I have listened to 100 shows between early 2018 and mid 2018. I took breaks from listening to the podcasts to listen to the books that the guests mentioned.  I started looking for properties in March of 2018 and in May I bought another duplex. This time in Alabama. I will close on it in June of 2018 which brings me to five doors.

This is my first post. I started buying real estate in about 1997. It was a condo in Middlebury VT.  I sold that for a slight profit and bought a house in Vergennes Vermont. The house had a basement room and separate entrance, so I had a bathroom installed and I lived in the basement and rented out the top of the house for 2 years. It was a 3 bedroom 1 bath house and it rented for the full mortgage. This was my first house hacking experience. I recently joined Bigger Pockets, where they discuss this strategy. 

After two years, I sold the house and bought a duplex in Vergennes Vermont. I have had that property since 2003 or 2004. I have made many landlording mistakes with that property, but I have just turned it over to a property manager. I will tell you about some of my mistakes in the next post as well as bring you up to date on my current activity.