As most of you know (because I obnoxiously mention it again and again here in the forums), I live in half a large duplex that I bought in unlivable condition for $45K cash for back in the beginning of 2017. I've spent years of my own spare time fixing it up, and Zillow now tells me the place is worth $191K. This duplex was initially custom-built for a local heiress, but by the time I ended up with it, it couldn't pass a housing inspection by a blind code official. It's still not ideal, but the upstairs is actually rather nice and rents for $950, and the downstairs, where we live, looks less and less like a construction zone weekly.
I'm bringing all this yet again because I want all of you to picture my wife and I in this duplex just talking around on our back porch last Sunday afternoon (I was priming a door). We were discussing our next acquisition, which we want to be a small multifamily somewhere in the $500-$750K range. Our plan now is to sell a single-family in our portfolio that I've never liked but is mostly paid off, and 1031 the money into the cash injection for a commercial loan by our regular banker. The sale of the single-family should easily cover what we'll need for the cash injection and about thirty thousand left over for a war chest to fix whatever comes up with the new acquisition.
We are confident in our plans and our skills and the rest of our team in this new endeavor, we have a good handle on what needs to be done, and really, while this will be a major move for us, it won't overextend our resources. Not by a long shot. So last Sunday, there we were, ironing out a few more of the details between us.
It occurred to me that I could never imagine my parents having such a conversation. Never heard anyone in the close group of friends I've developed in my life casually talk numbers like this. Nobody in my wife's erstwhile professional circle of friends (nursing assistants), no one in mine (teachers). Just real estate people, and 9/10 of real estate people are just full of overblown crap on general principle. But here we were, a childless couple in this nondescript duplex, calmly working toward a level of self-made affluence I couldn't have really imagined as a child. A million dollars? Two million dollars? Three? Impossible pie-in-the-sky numbers for me as a high school student in the late eighties, when I graduated high school. When I dreamed of affluence circa 1991, it included the obligatory hot car (that I can buy a few times over now), lots of cheap women throwing themselves at me (my body would end up weighed down so deep in the Mon they'd never find it, I married a dangerous woman), and a lot of expensive stuff (me, a student of minimalism today).
It also occurred to me that if my wife and I had kids, there was no way we could have asked them in 2017 to move into a leaking shack on the edge of a heroin ghetto, where a dude got shot just walking home in the alley out back in 2018, where the school system was ranked about as low as you can get for southwestern Pennsylvania (which is really saying something). Could we have done other things with children? Certainly. But I couldn't imagine the kind of kids we would be able to raise with how busy we've been, how little time we've had for anything other than generating income and expanding our portfolio. We certainly couldn't have gone on the vacations we've taken in the last few years with kids. I'm afraid we would have raised entitled little brats of little character and limited drive to succeed for any other reason than to create an opulent lifestyle for themselves, practically blind to their enormous privileges, just like most every other moderately financially-successful couple we know socially.
Thank you all for your insightful contributions here. I look at the things you've carefully done for your children, a college education, a car, a downpayment on a house, a no-interest loan...it's nice.
