From Zero to $8,000/Month Cash Flow in Just 2 Years (While Working a W2)

Hey, everyone. Dave here. Happy holidays from all of us here at BiggerPockets. To wrap up 2025, we're sharing a few of our favorite episodes from across the BiggerPockets network this year. Today, it's an investor story from Real Estate Rookie that was originally published back in April. So you can enjoy this episode. It's Ashley Kerr and Tony Robinson speaking with investor Luke Tetreault, and I'll be back with new episodes of the Bigger Pockets podcast starting January 2. This is The Real Estate Rookie Podcast, and I'm Ashley Kerr. And I'm Tony j Robinson. And let's give a big warm welcome to Luke. Luke, thank you for joining us today, brother. Thank you, guys. I appreciate it. So, Luke, you work as a welder for your full time job, but you've told us you don't love your job per se. So how did you land on real estate for your next steps for financial freedom? Well, I think it kinda started with, it was a little bit more than a dislike of my job. I found myself pretty pretty miserable. Just kinda disappointed in myself how I kinda ended up where I was at in life. I always felt like I should be doing something a lot bigger, a lot more, and I just never felt like I quite fit in with the guys I was working with, you know, the long sixty, eighty hours a week we were working. And, you know, before I knew it, I was 25 years old, and I'm like, I started welding straight out of high school. I didn't go to college. Just went kinda straight to work, and I just felt like my life just kinda I snapped, and all of a sudden, all of my younger years are over, and I'm just not really getting anywhere. So that's kinda how I kinda started thinking outside of the box, getting out, you know, what am I gonna do? And real estate kinda fell into my lap because it was I had one mentor in my life, and it was my best friend growing up's father. He was a custom home builder. He had a few single family rentals, and it was just kinda always topic of conversation. I can remember when we were younger, just, you know, he was going to pick up rent, or he was going to fix a house. I don't think I really took much to it, you know, when we were in high school, I was 18. You know, our mind was on some other things, and, but I think that kinda ingrained somewhere in my mind. You know, I always kinda knew I could fall back on that. So I think once I got to almost a breaking point of where I needed to make a change, you know, I kinda I called him up. I we had a quick phone call, and, I was like, yeah. Let's now or now, let's just try it. …