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My Friends All Laughed At Me When I Told Them This Strategy…But Then I Showed Them The Check

Jimmy Moncrief
4 min read
My Friends All Laughed At Me When I Told Them This Strategy…But Then I Showed Them The Check

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Have you ever told a friend, spouse, or work colleague a business idea and they laughed hysterically at you?

If so, join my club!

I basically have at least 2 business ideas a day.  I used to tell my wife all of them to get her insight.  Well…..after 12 years of marriage she was exhausted with all of my ideas.  Some worked great (and paid for some real estate and nice vacations) others….not so much.

If you are reading this blog there is a high probability you are an entrepreneur and have this problem as well.

So my wife gave me a rule that has been very helpful in keeping our marriage together.

This rule applies to all “business ideas” I have.

Here is the rule: I can’t tell my wife the business idea, until it starts generating revenue. 

It’s a great rule, because no matter how awesome the idea is, it takes work on my part for the idea to start generating revenue.

Anyway, I wanted to share a unique story that just happened with one of my “ideas” that everybody laughed at, until I told them how much money I was going to make.

For a backstory, I used to underwrite and finance hotels.  Interestingly enough, several years ago, Chattanooga, TN had the number one hotel market in the country with an average occupancy greater than 110%!

I’m also a triathlete and competed in an Ironman several years ago.

Ok, Jimmy how is this related?

Well, Ironman announced they were coming to Chattanooga about 6 months ago.  The race sold out in 9 seconds.  I knew with around 5,000 extra people in Chattanooga, in our very busy fall-travel season there was no way everyone was going to get a hotel room.

The Idea: Rent my House Out For The Week.

We are very fortunate to live only about half a mile from the river.  Additionally, the race passes by our house twice.

Now I had to decide exactly how I was going to rent my house out..

There are several ways to rent your house: Craigslist, VRBO (to learn more about how to rent your place and list for free on VRBO, click here), AirBnB, etc.

Craigslist

To be honest, I’m starting to hate craigslist.  I know that at least 10 people are going to cuss-me out in the comments for saying that.  But for every new thing I try to sell there, I get more and more SPAM.  Additionally, the quality of the actual potential customers keeps getting lower.

VRBO

I’ve used VRBO as a customer for several years.  However, it’s pretty ghetto and hard to use as an owner.

AirBNB

This is the option I chose.  The site is gorgeous and fun to use.  I also love the founders story.

Related: The Formula for Building Wealth and Massive Cash Flow in Real Estate Investing

Setting It All Up

It was super easy to get started with AirBNB.com

Since I was just testing this anyway, I chose a pretty high price to rent my whole house and I chose a 7 day minimum.  I took a ghetto google-earth screenshot of my house and within 10 minutes I had my house listed.

To be completely honest, I forgot about the listing.  But on Christmas Eve, I got a text and an email from AirBNB from someone requesting to stay at my casa!  I checked out their profile and then did the most important thing: I told my wife!

We were with her family for a “Happy Birthday Jesus” party and everyone started crying/laughing that Brittany (my wife) didn’t even know about it.  Luckily for me, everybody in her family owns their own business and loved the idea and my entrepreneurial spirit.  Brittany was on-board so I accepted.

A couple of months later someone booked it again for a family reunion!  They requested an exception to my 7-night minimum since they only needed 4-nights and it was during the week.  I thought that was acceptable considering I could still have my weekends at my house.

So this week, I used my Starwood points to stay at a local hotel for free.  My wife and kids get to enjoy downtown all day and we use the hotel pool at night.  Overall, it’s been a ton of fun!

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This is me and my family with our good friends that we invited to hang-with us at the indoor hotel pool.  Pretty fun considering it was 35 degrees outside!

Of-course, it’s extra fun when you get a nice direct deposit that more than covers your mortgage for the month and then some extra while you hung-out at a hotel for 4 nights.

Before we end I want to address two issues that literally everyone of our friends have asked:

1. What are you going to do while someone stays at your house? Go on vacation!  This week was a little bit of an exception, but we simply plan on going on a vacation every-time this happens, which I’m sure will only be 1 or 2 times a year.

2. What are you going to do with your valuables?  Well, part of the benefit of valuing experiences versus things is we don’t have much anyway.  Literally, we don’t have a T.V.  The rest of the stuff, we just took to a friends house.

The best thing for me was that I could control who stayed there and who didn’t.  If they don’t have a good review or I can’t vet them, they aren’t staying at our house.

Interestingly enough a good friend of mine who just moved to Fort Collins, Colorado is using AirBnB to pay for his mortgage. He has an extra guest room with an outside entrance and he has people staying with his family at his house several weeks out of the month.

This is proof of how well this strategy worked for me:

airbnb

Summary

I strongly want you to consider listing your house for some extra money.  A lot of people let people stay in an extra room.  For me, that’s too much work for too little cash.  However, a lot of my friends are paying their mortgage this way.

If you have any questions or comments – LEAVE ME A COMMENT!

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Note By BiggerPockets: These are opinions written by the author and do not necessarily represent the opinions of BiggerPockets.