It all started in December. The choice to live a more minimalist lifestyle with the No Spend Year I challenged myself to. Turns out I had a lot of extra time and money once I stopped shopping. 🤣
So I started listening to the BiggerPockets podcast, and a few other FI podcasts, along with reading a bazillion books for 60 days and kept penny pinching away. After talking to my husband, and getting him sold on my crazy ideas (besides the selling our house and living in a van down by the river idea), we set a goal to buy our first property by March 2020. Except this may surprise some of you..I’m kind of inpatient. 🤷♀️
We then went and looked at several places and decided to put in an offer on a single family home because we loved the location. We discussed doing short term AirBNB, but found out the city is pretty strict, so went with the long term rental strategy instead.
Closed on my 36th Birthday on 3/26 for $103k with 15% down and walked into $10k of equity right off the bat. We put a few hundred bucks on paint and new screens, trim touch up, etc. and put some weekend sweat equity in to get it rental ready.
If you remember from other posts, we recently got rid of a car payment and daycare, clearing up $1100 a month of outgoing expenses. So we have decided to pay the $700 mortgage out of our own funds, and take the $900 rent and put it in our investments account for a down payment on the next one. (We actually got a really great tenant who signed a two year lease AND paid $10k for the first years rent in full). We are going to use that rent towards our next investment and are currently in the market for a multi-family if you know of one. 👀
It still feels a little weird to say we are landlords. We dreamed about and talked about owning real estate for around five or so years. But we were so strapped with debt and were scared because we didn’t have any real estate background, or solid goals or plans put in place. Didn’t realize it was as easy as picking up some books and listening to other investors tell their stories to educate ourselves. It’s exciting to see our years of hard work and sacrifices starting to pay off now though. Only regret is that we would have taken action sooner. Next step is continuing to build our net worth and getting a little closer to financial independence every day!!
