However, in his early twenties, Serin decided to quit working full-time in order to pursue a career in house flipping as a means of earning an income and building wealth.

In an eight-month period beginning in October 2005, Serin purchased eight houses in four southwest U.S. states, and then began blogging about the foreclosure[2] process on the properties he was unable to resell.

Before quitting his web design position in January 2006, Serin claimed an over-inflated income (roughly five times his actual pay) on his loan applications,[5] reasoning that many other borrowers were using similar strategies to obtain mortgages for which they would not otherwise qualify.

[10] Despite already being deeply in debt, in late 2006, Serin borrowed $16,000 to purchase a week-long real estate seminar course purporting to teach "creative financing"[11] at Nouveau Riche University (NRU) in Phoenix.

[12] Jim Piccolo, the founder of NRU, was later fined a record $6 million in 2011 by the Arizona Corporation Commission for running a fraudulent real estate investment scheme.

[13] Months later, as the United States housing bubble began to rapidly deflate, Serin became unable to pay the mortgages or sell the properties; at one point, he estimated that he was approximately $2.2 million in debt, with a net worth around negative $600,000.

[14] Because of the sheer magnitude of Serin's debt and the improbability of his story, some observers had initially questioned its veracity, alleging that the blog was either performance art or a viral marketing campaign.

[16] His story was featured in numerous media outlets—among them, USA Today,[1] National Public Radio,[17] New York magazine,[18] the San Francisco Chronicle,[19] The Economist,[6] The Suze Orman Show,[20][21] and ABC's Nightline.

The overall tone of the blog's comments gradually went from encouraging Serin to openly deriding him for his inaction, his apparent nonchalant attitude towards his financial issues, and his role in the then-emerging subprime mortgage crisis.

In Facebook comments, he stated that the name change is a sort of rebranding for the next chapter of his career/business in real estate, and that it will allow him much more control over his search results online, somewhat of a clean slate.