Financial Freedom One House At A Time
Overcoming obscurity I will never forget that day. I was at a function at my congregation and Britt, one of my friends there, pointed over to my truck and asked who it belonged to. The truck had a “We Buy Houses” wrap on the tailgate, and Britt had never seen the vehicle before because we normally show up to functions like these in Ashley’s van. When I…
Fighting for rental space This year has been very strange as far as rentals go. First off, rent rates have skyrocketed. In 2018, we have seen two-bedroom, one-bath houses rent for as much as 3/2 floorplans were renting for just two years ago. With the spike in rent prices, odd things have started happening. For instance, we’ve had con artists trying rent people our houses. In previous…
We bought a little three-bedroom mill house recently, that we had intended to keep. The problem was that we got so busy working on other projects that the house sat for a while. We kept rationalizing that since we got it at such a good deal, it was OK for it to sit. But after two months, we could see that it was costing us money just sitting there,…
As I write this, I am sitting in the Destin area of Florida in a town called Miramar Beach, and today has been the best day of our vacation. That being said, getting here wasn’t easy. The last workday before left was beyond full. I left the house at 7 a.m. to make my first stop at the Calhoun Home Depot to pick up a large order for…
Have you ever started on a property just knowing it was going to be a homerun? I know we have. One that sticks out in my memory was a 2,000-square-foot, three bedroom, three full bath, brick ranch on eight acres. We purchased this house for $40,000 and did a jam up rehab, including custom tile, hardwoods and new counter tops. We put a new roof on it, installed…
I’m so sore right now. My hands hurt, I have bruises and cuts all over the place, and my back is killing me. This is all from doing something I haven’t done in a long time: I’ve been framing on a house. Sometimes I get asked if having a contractor’s background has helped us in our investing career. To begin with, it did. When it was just…
Boy, do we have a full plate right now. We have four active rehab projects, plus three rentals houses we need to fill. Put it all together: yep, that’s seven open properties. Woohoo! Rehab No.1 is located on Rush Chapel Road. Painting and light installation was completed Tuesday which meant I had to get cabinets and flooring ordered and delivered so the guys could keep moving forward. …
We’re doing a property right now that has a propane furnace, so we went to see Ms. Sue over at Calhoun LP Gas. She got me taken care of and scheduled their guys to bring me a tank the following week, weather permitting. As we were doing the paperwork, Ms. Sue noticed I was reading everything and remarked that that was fine, but that it was just their…
I was having lunch with a good friend and investor named Emmett, recently. We talked about the current market and strategies we’re implementing, and we discussed what we see our other investor friends doing. One of those friends hasn’t done many deals lately because she got her start when the market was at the bottom. Now that the market is moving so much, she is afraid it will…
I was in the middle lane of Interstate 75 about a mile south of Exit 312 heading north. I needed to meet Ashley at Exit 315. People were slowing in front of me, so I decided to merge left. I glanced left, saw nothing and began to drift into the next lane. That’s when I heard an almost immediate crunch. I whipped my truck back into the…