I bought my first house at 25 years old before I got out of the Army. It was a 100 year old condemned crack house, and I paid $35,000 cash for it. Money I had saved up from being deployed overseas the previous year. It was in Waco TX in 2005, which was about 10 years before Chip and Joanna made the city famous.
When I left the Army in January 2006 I started community college and lived in the crack house with no running water, no heat, and the only power I had was a temporary pole in the yard where I could run an extension cord into the house.
Fast foward to 2013, and I came across 2627 Sanger Ave, which was in much the same condition. I sent a letter to the owner, a guy who lived in Midland TX and wound up taking over the payments on the mortgage and paying around $10,000 in back taxes. The property was delapidated, overgrown, and barely habitable, but it did have squatters! Actually, there was a property management sign in the front yard but they had stopped trying to collect rent, and I can't really blame them.
Over the years since 2013, I've been fixing it up little by little, to where it is now a nice place to live.
