Curious to find out how to increase your property value by over $10,000 in a weekend? Today, we are covering everything, including what we did, how we did it, the materials for the project, the cost, and breaking down the added value. Background When we found out about Financial Independence and Early Retirement, we began looking for easy ways to lower our cost of living. We quickly became tired of living in a super fancy condo. Don’t get us wrong, we love nice stuff as much as the next person. The problem was, a significant amount of our money was going to the mortgage and the ridiculous HOA just to…

Well, we’ve taken a major step back in our mortgage payoff goal that we talked about in our article about our Monthly Mortgage Goals. Like a $98,595 step back. Like an alcoholic who just wants to sit in a bar, it was only a matter of time before we fell off the wagon. Well, maybe our scenario isn’t quite that bad. We weighed our options and decided to go ahead and capitalize on a good deal while we were still working, and had the cash on hand for a decent down payment. The diversification of the deal is definitely an added bonus. To be clear, as I’m sure you gathered from…

One of the most common questions we get as landlords is: “How do you get good tenants?” And that is a very good question. One of the biggest concerns as a property owner is how will someone else treat my property. Hell, we live right next door to our tenants, so imagine picking your neighbor. The unfortunate thing is that you won’t truly know if they are a quality tenant until you already have them. But, you can definitely raise the likelihood that you get a quality tenant by qualifying them through these methods. Getting Good Tenants I’d like to preface the rest of the article with mentioning: to get…

Haven’t you heard its taboo to talk about money, politics, and religion? Well, we are going to go taboo in this article, but don’t worry, only one of those three is our focus today: money. And more importantly, debt. We are going to put all our numbers out here, so you can see just how much debt we have, and you can follow along to see just how effective we will be at paying it off. Better to go to bed hungry than wake up in debt – Proverb A few articles ago, we posted about going From One to Nine Rental Units in a Year, and we mentioned that once…

Intro Way back before I had ever heard of Mr. Money Mustache, ChooseFI, or the FIRE movement, I was interested in real-estate investing. I had zero knowledge, zero experience, and zero funds (literally to all three). All I had was a lifetime experience of growing up poor, a half read copy of the 4 Hour Work Week (which was only because I read the 4 Hour Body first and decided to check out Tim Ferris’s other offerings), and the results of a google search about different ways of passively making money. I didn’t feel that I had enough knowledge about any particular subject to write an e-book about, I had…

Housing is by and large the most expensive expenditure in the typical American budget. The average person spends 30% of their income on housing alone (which is one of the criteria I have for screening tenants, the rent must be 30% or less of their income to qualify). I genuinely find this to be a baffling number. 30% of every dollar that comes into the average person’s account is earmarked for housing. Lets go through some numbers: If your family is making the average household income of $59k a year, and you’re spending the average of 30% of your income on housing, you’re blowing through $17,700 a year. Or, $1,475…