My Career and Real Estate Journey
I started with nothing. My parents were poor, I dropped out of high school. I was living on my own by age 17. But I realized early on that I did not want to work a minimum wage job for the rest of my life. I went to cosmetology school at age 16 1/2, graduated at 17 before the rest of my former classmates had even graduated high school.
That didn’t last, but I still keep my Idaho cosmetology license for $20 a year so I can shop at the wholesale beauty supply stores.
My vision has always been bigger. Bigger than a 9 to 5 job, bigger than simply working for myself. I want to grow a successful business and help you to do the same.
I want to own more real estate and build more equity and help you do the same.
And of course, I want to continue helping you save money on your taxes, and understand the best tax structure for your business or businesses.
It is so important for your business to hire a confident and proficient bookkeeper. I have a few excellent referrals from our local community if you are interested.
Anyway, back to starting with nothing…
It wasn’t entirely nothing. I think my parents each scrounged together $1000 to pay for cosmetology school.
My grandparents on my dads side were much more financially savvy and had set aside $5000 for each of their grandkids to attend college. Thanks to that, Pell Grants, and working part-time while attending school I was able to get my bachelors degree with only about $25,000 in student loan debt.
I didn’t really have a desire to go to grad school after getting my bachelors degree, but my grandparents had another $5000 earmarked for each of us to pursue a masters degree, so I enrolled in an online MBA program, took out more student loans and used my grandparents $5000 to buy my first home at age 25. (Never finished the MBA, in case you were wondering.)
That’s how I creatively got into real estate at a young age. Now at the time (2005) I was approved for a $126,000 mortgage on my $45,000 a year salary, but even though I was approved, the payment was too big for me to comfortably make on my own so I had a roommate move in with me to help cover the mortgage.
This allowed me to still have a life and not be house poor. Did you know that mortgage companies will approve your payment to be almost half of what you make? But financial gurus like Dave Ramsey teach that you your housing expense shouldn’t be more than 25% of your monthly take-home pay after taxes.
So, first wise move:
Scrape together enough to get into your first home.
Don’t be house poor right off the bat. Get roommates or figure out some other way to supplement your income so you still have money left over for the next big thing.
You see, most people have to sell their home to buy their next. But what if you saved enough on your own to make that down payment on a second home without needing to sell the one you already own?
That’s what I did with the help of my husband at the time. We saved up, borrowed money from a private source and bought a triplex.
We lived in the downstairs apartment of that property for three years, renting out the upstairs apartment to supplement our mortgage and using the third unit as a home office, which created a large tax deduction for my business.
Then we did the same thing again. We saved up money, bought another house and converted the duplex to 100% rental use. In the beginning, things were tight. I’m not gonna lie, there were months when the rent didn’t cover the expenses, and we had to supplement with our own income.
But now, 16 years later, we have over $300,000 in equity and when fully rented the property cash flows over $2000 per month.
The original townhouse that I purchased when I was 25 also cash flows about $800 per month after expenses and I owe less than $62,000 on the mortgage (which is at 2.25% I might add, so while I am excited to pay it off and have that milestone in my life of paying off a home, I’m only paying the minimum payment on that loan right now, and putting any extra towards higher interest rate obligations and savings.
From there, we bought a short sale home in Molalla for $225,000 in 2011. Five bedroom, three bath, three car garage, RV parking. I loved it even though it was in a development of almost identical houses.
Five years later, we got a letter in the mail with an offer for our home. It wasn’t on the market, we hadn’t been shopping, but when this offer came along, it just seemed like timing in a lot of ways. The offer was above what homes were selling for at the time, so we decided to cash out and rent for a bit to see what the market would do. We used the proceeds from the sale to pay off our private loan we had borrowed for the duplex, along with the second mortgage on that property, making it cash flow even more.
We also set some aside for the next big thing. At the time I thought that was going to be saving up to buy land and eventually build a home. As an income tax specialist and travel enthusiast, I had the ingenious idea of leaving the country for a year… or two or three, living somewhere with a lower cost of living than the US, still working our remote jobs on the US economy, but being able to exclude over $100,000 in income each year with the foreign earned income tax exclusion.
I thought this was a great idea, and I had always wanted to expose my kids to other cultures and help them learn a second language early on when their brains are still young and pliable.
My husband at the time or my wasband, as I’ve come to refer to him these days, was not on board with that idea. He had never lived outside Oregon and couldn’t fathom leaving for that extended period of time.
However, he was willing to try six months out of the country on a tourist visa so in the fall of 2016, we took a load of furniture and belongings to my dad‘s property in North Idaho (before that we had already downsized considerably when we sold our Molalla house) and furnished a cabin that we had been fixing up on his property, then flew our family to Mazatlan, Mexico, where we had already rented a house, site unseen, that I had found on craigslist. (I did have a local friend of a friend who was willing to consult with me and felt the neighborhood that the house was in would be a safe option for our family.)
It’s hard to believe that was already eight years ago. I remember we left the country on the day. Trump was elected President for the first time.
That first winter we spent six months in Mexico and I attempted to homeschool the kids. I learned rather quickly that I’m not cut out to be a homeschool mom so we ended up putting Kenton in daycare and a friend of mine who was snowbirding in Mazatlan at the time, and used to be a school teacher herself, was willing to take on the task of homeschooling the girls while their dad and I worked.
After our six months was up, we came back to the states and I spent about a month in North Idaho on my dad’s property before moving back into my townhouse in Oregon city that just happened to be vacant from renters at the time.
In September 2017, we decided to go back to Mexico for an entire school year and put the kids in Spanish-speaking private school to be immersed in the language.
Jenica was in fourth grade, Tenley was in first grade and in Mexico, they start kindergarten at age 3, so Kenton was in kindergarten 1.
They would all get on the school bus in the morning and go to school and I’m so proud of them. By the end of our time there, Jenica was able to test into the bilingual program back here in the states at the same level as her classmates who had been studying and learning in Spanish since kindergarten.
It was such an amazing experience for our family that wouldn’t have been possible without cash flowing real estate investments.
I’m so thankful for my career and experience in the finance and tax world. Do you have questions about real estate investing, home ownership, self-employment, or the foreign tax exclusion? I would love to be a resource! Head on over to my website to explore the services and resources we offer. It’s not just all about tax preparation, we also offer educational materials, advisory sessions, and coming soon… tax planning packages.
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