The day I started my first job, I remember the human resources representative asking me “What percentage of your salary do you want to save in your Retirement Account?”. The company I was working for matched the employee contribution to a certain amount, so I contributed the maximum amount I needed to receive the full contribution.
Through the years as I moved to different companies, I continued that same strategy, contributing the maximum amount needed to receive the maximum match from my employer.
Did I make money? Yes, I did not do too bad. The problem was that there was not enough investment diversity. If invested in the stock market – as the stock market excels, the interest rate declines. If invested in bonds, or other interest making deposits – as they perform well, the stock market historically does not. So, even though I thought I had my eggs in different baskets, it turns out that my eggs were in baskets that were tied to each other. They were inversely proportional to one another. As one decreased, the other increased.
I met my husband, Marshall, while we were both working in California. I was supervising a Quality Assurance laboratory and he was a young Naval Civil Engineer Corps Officer. We were a chemist and an engineer combo – a match made in STEM heaven. We were married and the Navy whisked us off to Sicily for three years. Sicily taught us the balance of working hard while also enjoying life. We continued to travel the world with the Navy, moving every 2 years or so. Of course, this made my resume look like a revolving door, in and out of jobs with every move. We knew there had to be a better way to use my individual strengths and focus them into one new career pathway, one that would lead us to a flexible retirement.
For Marshall and I to achieve this and to have our retirement eggs in several different baskets – we turned to investing in single family rentals. Marshall’s family had already invested in single family housing, so we simply followed the family pathway. Marshall’s parents were builders, and several of his siblings are builders as well. When Marshall’s family gets together, they discuss real estate. Every Thanksgiving, every Christmas, table talk revolved around new construction in the area. Real estate discussions energized every gathering, and were often followed by driving tours of all the new construction we had just discussed at dinner.
We realized for us to get ready to jump into the real estate investing game, we needed to save up for our first investment. We saved my entire salary from my last job – a whole 18 months. This was the seed money to invest in our first rental house. For the next several years, we kept reinvesting the money we made to build more houses, increasing our real estate portfolio.
That was in 1998. Here we are some twenty years later and still in real estate. After Marshall retired from the Navy, he took a job with ExxonMobil. Lunchtime conversations for him at work started out about family vacations, but soon turned to real estate investing. Wait, didn’t I just say that about holiday dinners with the family? Anyway, as with the Navy, we traveled the world with ExxonMobil. They sent us to Calgary, Canada, and then to Dubai, UAE. When we returned home some 4 years later, multifamily real estate had become a popular retirement investment opportunity. We researched multifamily investing, joined a mentor group, found some partners that had the same goals and interests, and haven’t looked back since.
We named our multifamily real estate investment business Capitano Investing Group. So why Capitano? Capitano is Italian for captain. Sicily was one of our favorite duty stations, and Captain was Marshall’s Navy rank when he retired. Capitano blends the hard work it takes to prepare for tomorrow with the enjoyment of life today. Join us on our journey, won’t you?
Cindy Sykes
Co-Founder,
Capitano Investing Group
