October 17, 2017

The One Thing No One Tells You About House Hacking

House hacking is a great way to get started in real estate investing. You get all of the benefits of owning a home (tax write-offs, low mortgage interest rates) as well as the advantages of having a rental property (rental income, more tax write-offs).

Unlike traditional investing though, house hacking can have a greater impact on your personal life, because well, you’re mixing home and work.

One of the negative aspects of building a a real estate portfolio through house hacking comes when you have to move into the next property. This is not only time-consuming but also expensive.

Even so, The Troop and I plan to house hack our way to financial freedom. At least for the first few properties until we feel more comfortable buying pure investments. That means we’ll be moving into a new home every one to two years. We’re young, we don’t have children, we don’t have a lot of stuff. How hard would it be to pack up our lives and move so often? I really didn’t see what the big deal was.

Until it came time to move.

Let me paint the picture for you. At the time of purchase of our first investment property and during the first three months of renovations, we continued to live in our small 2-bedroom apartment in the next town over from the duplex. (Where we lived for the past year.)

It was great because we didn’t have to live in the middle of a construction site. We would finish a long day working on the house, lock the door behind us and plop on the couch at our apartment. No sawdust floating in the air, fully functioning air conditioning, and no mess to walk through. It was quite an awesome setup.

Our lease was coming up at the end of August and the duplex was nowhere close to being complete.

Crap.

The Troop ensured me that the duplex would be livable by the end of the month. But, something you need to know about him, he doesn’t have the best sense of time. Knowing this, I started coming up with option B.

The Troops parents live about 40 mins North of both our apartment and the duplex and offered to let us stay with them for a few weeks. That solved one problem, but what would we do with all of our stuff?

Our needs were unique in that we needed both transportation and storage since we couldn’t dump all of our belongings in my future in-laws living room. I looked into renting a moving truck and a storage unit but the idea of loading up a truck, unloading it into a storage unit, just so we could load up the truck again a few weeks later seemed like a waste of time to me.

We needed a better solution.

That’s when I came across PODS®. PODS® is a moving and self-storage solution that fit our needs perfectly.

The PODS storage container was dropped off at our apartment, we loaded it up during the next few days, and then it was moved over to our house to store for the next month or so. It was such a seamless process.

My favorite part of all was that we didn’t have to be home to have the PODS storage container dropped off or picked up. The driver just called my cell phone 20 minutes prior to confirm and the rest was taken care of. So much easier than renting a truck and a separate storage unit myself.

While working with PODS® has been great, the actual packing of all of our stuff was not.

Remember when I said, how hard can it be? Well, somehow we have amassed a whole lot of stuff. Way too many pairs of shoes, an unacceptable amount of holiday decorations, and enough empty wine bottles to keep a true crafter busy for a year. (Don’t judge. I was planning on making cute drink wear)

It took us forever to pack everything up. I started questioning our plan. Did we really want to move every year or so?

Instead of giving up on our real estate goal, we decided to focus on living a simpler lifestyle with less “things” moving forward.

But who am I kidding, with Joanna and Chip Gaines’ new line being released in Target on November 5th, I won’t be able to resist buying a few unnecessary pieces.

So right now, we’re staying with The Troops parents while we finish up the renovations. We’re hoping to move into the duplex by the ~~end of October~~ beginning of November

With so much chaos going on in our lives right now, it has been great that the moving and storing of our belongings has been super easy.