House Hack? More Like Life Hack

Fun fact about Jarod and I, we got married on July 10th, 2021 at 22 years old and 10 days later closed on our first home in the town we grew up in. Here's how we turned our first home into a cash flowing investment property.

For some background, Jarod and I have always both loved everything to do with real estate but it wasn’t until later on in college when we started learning more about real estate investing and that love grew.

We had so much fun decorating our first apartment together and living on our own until we moved out of said apartment in May 2021 and lived with our parents for a while. We knew we wanted to get back in a place of our own as soon as possible (no offense to our parents but going from moving in together to moving in together with parents... was not ideal). So, we started researching how to make home ownership a possibility for us.

Jarod began reading books, listening to podcasts, meeting with other investors and absorbing all the knowledge he could on how to make our dream of home ownership a reality. Being young and spending a lot of money on our wedding, upcoming student loan expenses, etc., financial burdens became very real.

Going to throw out a plug here and note Bigger Pockets was a huge help in providing Jarod knowledge on the different ways real estate investing can provide one so much value and freedom, with an emphasis on financial freedom.

Through these resources, we soon learned about house-hacking, the strategy of renting part of your house out to help pay your mortgage and essentially live for free. Seems simple in theory, right? Don't worry, we had to convince ourselves we weren't crazy for a bit, too.

Wanting a place of our own ASAP, we jumped on the idea of buying our first home and house hacking it. We began house hunting in the craziest, 20+ offers, no inspection, sight unseen, over priced, ultra competitive market, all amidst planning our wedding.

Our goal while looking for a house, and our recommendation for anyone else considering house-hacking, was to find something we could add value to such as a home with an unfinished basement, a need for cosmetic updates, and/or a layout that was conducive to house-hacking.

The home we landed on was a 1960s one story, single family that needed a lot of TLC and had been used as a rental most of its life. Crazy enough with the shape it was in, there were 16 showings the first day and if I remember correctly, 2 offers on the table with best and final by the end of the weekend. Knowing we had to move quickly, we put in an offer and got lucky enough to end up with the house - we were really doing it!

We got married, got the keys to our new house and went to town on demolition to prep for renters to live in the upstairs floor while we would plan to live in the basement. It worked pretty well since the basement had its own walkout entrance where we could come and go and have our own space separate from the upstairs level. We built our own little kitchenette in the basement where we lived off of our air fryer and portable two burner stove.

Our goal with the remodel was to update key spaces in the home with a clean simple, more modern feel while also sticking to a very tight budget. I know what you’re thinking when looking at the pictures and yes, we went with the trendy gray floors at the time but hey - that is all part of the process. You learn, switch things up, and make some mistakes in order to find what designs you like best. We have come a long way in determining our design style and I am confident it will forever be evolving. It also can’t be too bad as we ended with an article written about us in our local newspaper, the Star Tribune! Crazy!

We learned a lot about entrepreneurship, home remodeling and ourselves in the process. We also lucked out with great tenants, neighbors, a huge yard for our pups, and the biggest bonus of all - a years worth of savings by living rent free. Jarod even ended up turning this experience into a career by getting his general contractors license which eventually led to the creation of Abodie Construction!

Overall, this house was such a blessing for the almost year and a half we spent there. After closing on another home in August and moving in October 2022, we decided it was time to let this gem go and put our focus into new projects! The many hours of blood, sweat, and tears that went into this remodel to get it from how it started when we first bought it to where it is now. It is so fun to think back on all of the memories we made here.

On to the next!