When was the first time you took your destiny into your own hands - What did you do, what made you do so, what was the outcome and would you change anything looking back in hindsight?
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Shortly after I got married, my spouse and I looked at each other, realizing we had enough equity in our home to borrow from it and buy a rental property was a moment I shall not forget. We had slaved away fixing our home to live in it and now we were going to forge into yet another adventure.
We could get $50,000 USD to buy something. At the time, there were no properties in California that we could buy with that, but I did have a brother living in Ohio at the time. Near where he lived, there were plenty of homes for sale around the $50K range, so we started to do our research. We contacted a realtor. It wasn't but a month or two when we decided on a condo that cost us $52,900. It was already occupied by a renter and he was paying around $600/month for rent, if memory serves right. Our payment would be $400/month and we'd pay about $50/month in HOA fees as I recall.
We were ecstatic...there was only one issue...we couldn't tell anyone! My spouse's grandparents had been in real estate before and both parents were against investing in real estate. Both of mine had invested long ago and we were both sick and tired of hearing anyone else's opinion about what we could or couldn't do. We decided to have a pact...no telling anyone that we had bought a rental property until we had owned it for at least 6 months.
Similar to the unsplash image above, our condo was in great shape. It rarely needed any repairs. We didn't have a property manager, but our realtor said she would do the duty for 10% of rent. At this point, we were making $100/month after all the HOA, house payment, and property management fees. It was great! We had taken a leap and landed nicely.
Our tenant didn't pay on time a few times, so we collected a late fee, and later around 2007, before the big housing market crash in 2008, we sold the condo to our renter for about 7K more than we bought it.
When we told our family, they all freaked out as we thought they would. They started telling us how we couldn't do it, we'd lose all our money, tenants wouldn't pay their rent, etc. We were fortunate to be able to tell them we'd had it for 6 months already and everything was running smoothly! We took destiny into our own hands and we were happy for having done it!
Looking back, we wouldn't have changed anything because it is what we knew at the time. If I were to go back to myself with the ability to convince myself to do something else, I would have. It was a great experience, but I would have forced my younger self to buy in a different area...to have kept the cash in the house so I could sell it and put the money into a mutual fund or Orange County, CA property. If I had bought a property in Orange County at the time, it would have likely cost me around $300K and it would have been hard to handle, but it would be worth about 3x that today. There are many things I would convince my younger self to do now, but looking back, it was a great decision that ended in great results. It taught me that I was a champion again!
Thanks to @galenkp for introducing this writing challenge! Good luck to all who also participated!
