Our Real Estate Goal
As like many others, we want to reach financial freedom. By that, we don’t mean lavish trips to secluded islands, private jets, and the finest wines, but the freedom to make life decisions without worrying about financial constraints. There are some real estate investors who want to earn loads of money fast. Quit their jobs in a few years and stick it to the man. That’s a great goal for others, but for us, we both like our careers and have a different plan.
We’re in this game for the long haul and are choosing to use real estate to fund our early retirement. As you may know, The Troop is a State Trooper in New Jersey with a forced retirement age of 55. So that’s our target. By creating streams of passive income through real estate, we plan to both retire in 2044.
So how will we do it?
Well first we had to come up with our freedom number. Or how much money we would need to live on per year. Since we’re still early in our careers and don’t have any children yet, this was hard to figure out. So we took an educated guess.
Living in New Jersey with high taxes and a high cost of living, we decided that we’d like to have $150,000 coming in each year of passive income. (In today’s dollars). Since The Troop will have a pension from his 28 years of public service, we did take into account that money as well which will be added on top of the $150,000.
Next, we needed to figure out how many units we’d need to generate that income. We plan on investing in properties that will cashflow roughly $400 per unit per month after fully paying off the mortgage. This is where the math comes in.
$150,000 year divided by 12 months = $12,500 a month
$12,500 divided by $400 (The cash flow per unit) = 31.25
For numbers sake, we’d rounded that up to 32. So we will need 32 fully paid off units.
Paying off those units will take some time, so we can’t simply have a goal to acquire them all by 2044, we need to have them paid off by then. So our acquisition goal is 32 units by 2034. So we needed to figure out how many units per year we needed to buy. Time for some more math!
This goal was set in January of 2017. 17 years away from our acquisition goal date.
32 Units divided by 17 Years- 1.88 Units Per Year
Or
17 Years multiplied by 12 Months = 204 Months
204 Months divided by 32 Units = 6.37 Months
So we have to buy roughly 2 units a year or a unit every 6.3 months.
Now, let me clarify. one unit doesn’t necessarily mean one property. We are focusing on multi-family houses so two-four units per property. If we buy a four-plex this year, we don’t have to buy another property for two years.
So that’s it. We’re putting it out there hoping this blog will help us stick to it. 32 fully paid off units by 2044.
Join us on this adventure!
