Affluent but Frugal

Sunroom - my favorite part of the house If you have been reading real estate blogs or following real estate groups for the past few years everyone has been talking about short-term-rentals (AKA STRs, Airbnbs, vacation rentals) and saying it was THE way to make money in real estate. There are trends in everything and real estate is no exception. A few years ago it was flipping, and now it's short-term rentals. As a person who grew in the middle of the US and didn't see the ocean for the first time until I was 19, I really wanted a beach house. I love the beach. My dog loves the beach. My husband hated the beach, but he went with us anyway. It was my dream.  And we bought one in 2022.  Before we purchased, we looked at properties on several different beaches and I ran the numbers over and over again on individual properties to see what kind of profit/loss we could expect. I read everything I could in online groups about the unforeseen costs and pitfalls. I made budgets for furni...

My fiance and I bought our first rental property at the age of 30. It's not easy and it was a little scary but you can do it too. How? Here are some suggestions to help you get started! Save, save, save. You will need money to buy a rental property. You might be able to buy one without putting any money down but you certainly can't own one. You will need money to fix things that break and to cover vacancies. We saved some of our down-payment by renting out a room in our house, you can read about it here . If you're buying a $100,000 house you need to save up, I would suggest $40,000 for down-payment, closing costs and emergency fund before you buy! Yes this is hard, but it's also the most important step.At some point you might want to spend it all on a vacation but later, when the rent money starts to come it, you'll be so glad you didn't! Read about what makes a good rental property. When I first bought the house we live in now, I had the idea that event...

What do you think this mansion rents for? One of the key pieces of information when evaluating a rental property before you buy it, is how much rent you think you can get for it. This is a little bit of an art and a little bit of a science. This is the process I went through for our first rental and what I do now when looking at potential properties online for #2. Quick and dirty estimates If I am looking online at a property and I want to see if it's in the ball park, I will check two places. The first is the rent estimate from Zillow . I assume this is based on the attributes of the house from the listing information and some sort algorithm but I couldn't tell you what...really it's just a quick check to see if you can get at least1% of the purchase price in monthly rent. If the house is priced way over that, I don't bother looking further; not that the listing price is the sale or offer price but hey, there are lots of other houses, I want to be in the range ...