I feel so truly blessed. I have to start by thanking the Lord. Without him, none of this would have ever been possible.
This week was a week of huge wins for us. First, the wonderful US government has extended an exception our way by allowing us to purchase another primary residence using an FHA loan. This is because my husband's employer moved us over 100 miles away from our first primary FHA mortgaged property in Fort Wayne, IN.
That first house hack, our first house, allowed us to save about $12k while paying off about $7k in debt. That $12k allowed us to buy our second property, a fourplex in Fort Wayne. The fourplex was a steal. We purchased it for the list price of $49k and immediately had equity. Still not sure til this day why it was listed so low. My only guess has always been that the agent used single family comps instead of multifamily comps.
Six months after we purchased the fourplex we used the same lender and same appraisal to pull out most of our downpayment, $11k, with a refinance.
By using the BRRRR method we were able to use this same $11k to purchase our third property in Chicago on Friday. Actually, we only used $7k for our downpayment on a triplex with our second FHA 3.5% down loan.
$2400 of that $11k is going into new flooring and a new countertop at one of the apartments in the fourplex. The remaining went into needed roof and chimney work at our first home, the duplex. Both well-spent items that we used the equity in the fourplex to do.
Because I am a licensed REALTOR I am able to pay myself for every house that we buy and in particular with Keller Williams, I earn almost 100% commission up to two properties a year. With the purchase of the triplex on Friday I will earn a commission check for $9600. Which is $2600 more than what we put down on the house! Since we are on the intentional path of paying off all of our debts (besides our mortgages) we are going to use $5000 of that commission check to pay off our truck. At that point, we will increase our debt snowball by about $200.
This IS OUR THIRD HOUSE HACK! This time will get us to DEBT FREEDOM! Here it the break down for the triplex:
The mortgage $3108
Rent for the 1st floor apartment $800
Rent for the 2nd-floor apartment $1350
Leaves us with a payment of $958. We pay $1875 for rent now. We will snowball the different: $917 towards our student loan debt on top of the $900 we pay already. Using our debt calculator this snowball along with no lifestyle inflation will get us out of student loan debt by the summer of 2020!
Other windfalls this weekend:
We got an escrow check from the fourplex for $368 and our monthly mortgage went down to $333!!! That is an extra $131 a month in cash flow.
The couple that is going to take over our current lease is going to move in half way through the month saving us $937.50 plus they are going to pay our $250 relet fee!
To round it all out this week is our 11 year anniversary. We are so blessed and I feel so lucky to be able to share all of this with my husband.
Thank you BP for allowing me to share our success story!
