When I started out in real estate I was only 18 years old.

I had recently graduated from high school and was a complete beach bum. I didn't care about much other than a clear sky, the hidden beaches that only locals knew about, and catching a good wave – and also, becoming very financially secure.

My only problem was that I didn't really know how I was going to achieve the latter as I didn't really have any useful skill sets under my belt.

For my 18th birthday I was given a book from a friend of mine called Rich Dad, Poor Dad. When I was done reading it, I had a whole new perspective on life and knew exactly how I was going to achieve success and financial security.

I immediately dropped out of my community college courses and enrolled in real estate school. I completed it in three months and was off to the races.

The first brokerage I was pretty much the laughing stock of the office. My headshot looked like a missing child on a poster.

My Dad's realtor became my mentor. She was excited to have a fresh young protégé to take on the work she really didn't want to do anymore.

We worked together for about a year, then I moved to RE/MAX to work independently. Within a year I was on their top producer chart regularly, and I had cornered the market of Wall Street investors from Manhattan investing in South Florida.

I was still not even 21, and I was making twice the income of my own parents but with a quarter of the life experience to go with it. I'm not telling you this to brag, I'm telling you this so you know how far I had to fall to hit rock bottom a couple years later.

There was a lot of great runs from 19-22. I got married, gave birth to my daughter, was at the top of my career, had celebrity clients, owned my own home, life was good.

Until it wasn't.

Then the bubble burst. I was living in South Florida at the time, and we were one of the first to get hit with it. I remember closing out one of the best years of my real estate career and celebrating the New Year. Toward the end of that year sales were slow, but that was normal. Things always picked back up after New Years. It was the calm before the storm.

Only things never picked back up.

I had to default on a lease for a 3500 sq. ft. intracoastal-facing office that I ran and operated for a massive real estate company. I had to foreclose on my own home because I had an interest-only loan and couldn't afford the payments when they ballooned because I wasn't selling any more houses.

Of course, I didn't have much saved up because I did not listen to ANYTHING in Rich Dad, Poor Dad. I became a walking statistic of the real estate collapse.

I was at rock bottom. Ground zero. Four years of being on top of the world almost right out of high school, and I had nothing left to show for it financially speaking.

My husband decided we had to move to where the money is, and at the time, that was in Orlando. He owned a rain gutter company, and his business was also dependent on the real estate economy thriving. Orlando had not yet crashed, so there was plenty of opportunity for him up there.

I was depressed and felt like a massive failure. I knew what I needed to do, but I didn't do it. I was too immature, had too little life experience, and fell into the trap of greed and false security.

After about a year of dabbling in real estate and getting to know the market, I was ready to dive back in. I got offered a job working for a vacation rental management company. I was hired for my sales and marketing experience because I didn't know a single thing about vacation rentals walking into this job. I was so out of my comfort zone when I started.

My job was to visit all the guests that were staying in these homes and convince them to meet with one of the real estate agents to discuss investing in a home like the one they were staying in. It was a pilot program that I was the first to take part in.

The very first thing I observed was that almost all of the guests I was meeting with were from another country. The world was falling apart around here in the states, people were foreclosing left and right, but these guests were ready to spend upwards of $300K on a vacation rental purchase.

After I was about 10 appointments in I realized I was sitting on the wrong side of that table, I needed to be the agent that was talking to these buyers!

I wish I could say that I first got into vacation rentals because I wanted to change the world or contribute something altruistic, but I saw a financial opportunity. I knew it was a widely underserviced niche at the time (before Airbnb), and that I had stumbled onto something huge.

I put in my request to change to the selling side of the table. I'll never forget how upset my boss was when I gave him my letter. My intention was to stay with them and help grow their real estate arm, but they didn't share the same mindset of abundance and supporting people along in their journey that I did.

I ended up hanging my license with a small boutique brokerage in Davenport and starting my own brand called The Flamingo Group.

I was head over heels in love with the vacation rental.

In 2017, I decided I wanted to make a bigger contribution to the vacation rental industry and create a technology model that would address a lot of the gaps in the industry on the sales and investment side.

Our aim with Vrolio is to make buying a selling a vacation rental a seamless and stress-free process and arm the investor, the agent, and the owner with all the tools they need to successfully buy and sell a short-term rental.

This year Erica Mueller joins VR Mastered Vacation Rental Bootcamp — an immersive weekend of boutique vacation rental education to help you weather whatever the next decade brings.

She'll be teaching investing and budgeting for your vacation rentals.

Plus meet some amazing teachers and friends, and have some fun while you’re at it.

And this year, we're making it easier than ever to attend by dropping our event in one of the US’s most central locations: St. Louis, Missouri.