The Real Estate Dream

When I was in my early twenties, I remember one specific nugget of advice that my dad gave me (there were lots but this one really stuck with me).

“If I could do it again, for our first house, I would have bought a duplex.”

Here is a man who has put himself through university, got a job, bought a cheap house in the country, fixed it up while working full time and raising his young family and has been moving his way up in houses over the years. The house they were living in at the time was a wonderfully comfortable, family home more than large enough for all of us. And still, he had a thought about how he could have done something better. And it stuck with me.

When Tyler and I talked about buying our first home, this long remembered piece of advice was discussed and we decided that yeah, buying a duplex for our first home WAS a great idea. We could live in half, charge rent for the other half and essentially live almost rent free. So we did.

As we searched, for each property that we looked at, we evaluated the price, the rent numbers, the bills, etc. We had a spreadsheet that gave an extrapolated income versus expenses for each property (we were both in our nerd element here) - we needed to know that we could cover the expenses of the property for several months without any rental income coming in. In the end, we only looked at 5 or 6 properties before we made an offer. and we were ready to jump at the property when we found it because we had been doing our homework.

And so we did it - we jumped at the opportunity to buy our first property. Four year later, we did sell it when we were expecting our third kiddo. Today, I joke that we traded our investment property for a minivan, and we wouldn’t have it any other way.