Investing in Fourplexes 10 Years Apart
Back in 2017, I bought my first fourplex for $555K in Missouri. While it had a bumpy start getting units leased, it’s been a cash cow every year since. Fast forward nearly 10 years to today, where I’ve paid $1 million for a fourplex in Indiana, roughly twice the cost. While not an apples-to-apples comparison, today I’m going to pit the two against each other to illustrate just how much the real estate investing landscape has changed over the past decade. Let’s find out!
Comparing Cash vs Leveraged Real Estate Investing
In my previous post, I promised to run through concrete numbers to see whether my current all-cash fourplex in Indiana is a better investment than 2 financed fourplexes. Right now, I have $1 million invested in the fourplex. If I refinance the property, I could take out half its equity ($500K) to buy a second one. Let’s run the numbers together to find out which method yields the best results!
Matching Expenses with Passive Income
In my past 2 posts, I shared how I spent nearly $200K last year and how I’m about to purchase a brand new fourplex in Indiana that should yield about $70K per year. Today, I’ll talk about how the fourplex fits into my goal of getting my passive income to match my expenses. Let’s see where I am today and how much work I have left to go!
Investing in a Pre-Construction Fourplex
For years, I’ve been interested in a unique real estate investment model in which investors buy turnkey fourplexes before they’re built. This allows investors to buy a property at a lower price than they would pay for a finished building. However, for the past 10 years, I have miraculously found an excuse not to pull the trigger. But finally, last year I took the plunge! In this post, I’ll share with you how the process works and what the numbers look like.
My 2025 Spending Review
Hey everyone. Long time no see! Usually, my year-end reviews focus on how my investments performed, whether I plan to rebalance or reallocate them, and how my personal goals fared. However, today I’m simply going to focus on credit card spending, because it surprised even me once I looked at our annual credit card spending reports. Let’s take a look!
Why You Should Reallocate and Rebalance Your Investments Now
The market may be rebounding, but now’s the perfect time to revisit how your portfolio is structured. In this post, I break down the difference between reallocating and rebalancing — and highlight four common problem areas investors should fix before the next downturn: concentrated stock holdings, investing while in debt, overexposure to leveraged ETFs, and lack of diversification.
How to Build Your Kid's Credit Score
I purchased my first home when I was 22. I didn’t have enough cash to pay the entire down payment, but my lender didn’t mind because my credit score was already high enough to convince them I could handle more debt. This was made possible due to my parents’ insistence that I start using a credit card as soon as I turned 18. I didn’t know how useful building credit would be at the time, but I certainly understand now. This begs the question: At what age can someone begin building credit? And what are some ways to do it?
9 Money Moves to Make in 2025
So many investment options are available at our fingertips nowadays, making it difficult to decide what to choose. This can create an environment where people succumb to decision paralysis. In this post, I will share some of my top investment ideas to help you decide which might work for your situation. Let’s jump right in!
My 2024 Year-End Review
After the close of every year, it’s a good time to review how your investments fared compared to the overall market, myself included. In 2024, investors had a great year, with the S&P 500 returning 24.48%. The tech-heavy Nasdaq blew past it with a 31.02% return! In this post, I will look back at the year and review my various investments to see how they performed in comparison. Let’s dive in!
How to Calculate How Much You Need to Retire
It doesn’t matter how old you are; you need to know how much you need to retire. The sooner you understand this, the better equipped you’ll be to plan your financial roadmap. If you plan to retire at age 35, you’d need a hyper-aggressive investment plan. If you plan to retire at 70 and are already 65, you may need to start considering a conservative investment portfolio. Regardless, you need to learn to calculate your retirement number so you can start working towards that goal. Surprisingly, you can calculate this in just a few simple steps. Read on to learn how!
Pros and Cons of Retiring With Debt
When planning for retirement, one of the biggest hurdles you’ll face is deciding whether to retire with or without debt. Debt can be a strong wealth-building tool, but it carries risks you may not want to have in retirement. However, determining its importance will ultimately come down to your risk tolerance and retirement goals. Today, we’ll explore the pros and cons of debt to help you decide if debt is suitable for your retirement.
Year in Review of My 2023 Investments
About 3.5 years ago, I set a goal to reach $10 million by age 40. However, I set this goal when I lived in an expensive city in Silicon Valley, where median home prices exceeded $1 million. In the specific neighborhood I lived in within that city, homes were easily above the $2 million mark! Now that I live in a town with a lower cost of living in the Dallas metro, it would be tempting to lower that goal. However, I still believe reaching $10 million by 40 is attainable. To help accomplish this goal, I compare my investment performance to the S&P 500’s and Nasdaq’s at the end of every year. In this post, I will share my comparisons and see how my investments fared in 2023.
Financial Resolutions with Little Effort but Big Rewards
Happy New Year! I hope your finances had as great a comeback in 2023 as mine did! Now that it’s the start of a new year, you’re probably setting some resolutions for yourself. So be sure to include some financial ones, too. Here are some practical ones that require little effort but reward you handsomely in the long run.
Negotiation Tactics When Buying a Home
In today’s real estate market, you really need to know what you’re doing. Interest rates haven’t been this high in decades, pushing most home buyers to the sidelines. It’s also sidelined sellers since they know fewer people can afford homes with such high interest rates. Often, sellers plan to immediately become buyers once they’ve sold their home since they need a new place to live. In doing so, they’d have to give up their (likely) low interest rate loan when they sell and take on today’s high interest rates when repurchasing. Again, since this is not a desirable outcome for sellers, even fewer people are putting their homes on the market.
That’s all to say that inventory and demand are low, bringing the market to a grinding halt. However, if you’ve been keeping a close eye on your local market this year, the few brave sellers willing to sell their homes have been dropping their list prices quite a lot. So perhaps, if you’re careful, you may actually be in a good position to buy a home now despite today’s high interest rate environment. Read on to find out how!
How To Evaluate Investments
Whenever I talk shop with another investor, I’m often asked how I determine if an investment is a good one. While the answer is very subjective and personal, I evaluate 5 specific things every time I decide to pour money into a new investment. Today, I share what those are with some basic examples.
How My Investments Are Faring in 2023
Near the end of 2022, about 9 months ago, I shared that my net worth had plummeted a whopping $1.7 million! The losses were primarily attributed to a terrible year for stocks, with the Nasdaq down roughly 33% and the S&P down 20%. Going into 2023, I kept my expectations low due to the Fed’s aggressive rate hike plan and stubbornly high inflation. However, this year has proved to be one heck of a turnaround! In this post, I’ll share how much my net worth has recovered and what I’m doing with both stocks and real estate.
Launching a New House Flipping Business In 2023
As a follow up to my post on investing with other people’s money, one way I’ve invested with other people’s money this year is by partnering with another investor. Specifically, at the beginning of this year, I created an entirely new house flipping business with my new business partner. In this post, I will describe how we structured the business, why we decided to structure it that way, and some of the flips we’ve already undertaken!
Life Update As An Early Retiree
2022 was a crazy busy, expensive, and transitional year for my family and me. We moved and settled in twice last year, closed on our brand new home, bought big ticket items, and juggled multiple home improvement projects, all on top of the biggest one of all: adjusting to life as a Texan after living in California all our lives. In this blog post, I’ll touch on all those various aspects of our lives and share how each of them are going for us.
4 Ways To Invest With Other People's Money
Generally, you need to have money to make money. But wouldn’t it be great if you could simply borrow other people’s money to invest? Well, most of the time, you can’t just borrow money out of thin air. Someone who is willing to lend you money wants to have some assurances that you’re going to make good on your promise of paying them back entirely down the road, either in the form of monthly payments, collateral against your assets that they gain ownership of in the event you default on your loan, or both. But as soon as you start accumulating assets, you can start investing with other people’s money!
In this article, I will share 4 ways you can invest with other people’s money! If you don’t have assets to borrow against yet, learn these strategies anyways so you can learn which assets you’ll need to accumulate that are required for the borrowing strategies that are attractive to you.
5 Things That Helped Me Retire Early
When I tell people that I’m retired, they usually assume that I came from money, struck gold from a tech IPO, or that I got lucky throwing my life savings into Tesla or Bitcoin. But none of those are true. To achieve financial independence sooner than most, I think that I simply developed certain habits early in life that put me ahead of the curve.
After reflecting on what I did to retire at age 31, I came up with a list of 5 things that helped me accomplish my goal. Surprisingly, not everything on my list has to do with money, so read on to find out more!