read time: 5 minutes

🧠Goat Quote

🪙Two Cents

In last month’s edition, I went over Assets & Liabilities. I explained how a primary home loan is a liability since all it does is take $$ out of your pocket. You may have felt attacked, but this month I’m here to show you how you can convert your primary into an asset instead of a liability.

This term in real estate is called ‘House Hacking’. House Hacking refers to buying a primary residence and then renting out parts of it to put money back in your pocket. This is my favorite beginner strategy for those looking to get started in real estate investing.

One of the best things about house hacking is the ability to qualify for owner-occupied financing (aka primary residence financing). For most real estate investments, you need to put anywhere between a 20-30% down payment. However, for a primary, there are loan options allowing you to put down as little as 3.5% with an FHA loan. This applies to single-family homes (SFH) and up to a 4-unit property.

This means you can purchase a quadplex for as little as 3.5% down, live in one of the 4 units, and rent the other 3 out. This will create monthly cash flow to pay all expenses that come with this property and hopefully a little bit extra for you to enjoy the profit.

House Hacking can also refer to renting bedrooms within your SFH or putting your house on short-term rental websites such as Airbnb to generate income when you’re away. The whole goal is to build equity and bring in streams of income to cover all expenses associated with owning a property. 

❗Lessons Learned

There is absolutely no reason to reinvent the wheel

As you know, most of my career has been in customer-facing roles — talking to businesses day in and day out. To this date, I’ve probably spoken to over 200+ businesses. Do you know what I’m utterly shocked by? How each one of them wants to create every solution in-house. Now I’m talking about both small start-ups and Fortune 500 companies. The question becomes why?

I believe the answer lies in two things: having full control over the solution, and cost-saving. However, in my experience, there is no reason to reinvent the wheel. The true goal of any enterprise, as well as any individual, should be to minimize effort to live an easier life. So why not leverage the resources around you more?

The reason I’m sharing this is because it applies to your individual life as well. Take the next 2 weeks to observe how many repetitive mindless tasks you do — can you replace a few of those with automation? Whether that’s through AI or hiring a Virtual Assistant (VA), it can help make your life easier. Or, are there tasks you can eliminate? Instead of trying to find a solution, why not leverage existing resources to help you solve your problems?

📝Featured Blog Article

Ever felt like you couldn’t make a decision?

The average human makes about 35,000 decisions a day. Sadly for us, the more decisions we make, the worse our decision-making ability becomes.

So, how can we streamline our decision-making and make our lives easier?

⭐Rad Recs

Essentialism is one of my all-time favorite and must-recommend books. If you’ve ever had a hard time saying “no” or felt like you were spread too thin, this book is for you. It covers how to live with the mentality of “less but better” while focusing on the things that truly move the needle forward in your life and career.

👀Ask Me Anything!

There is a world of difference between working at a corporate company vs. a startup. If you don’t already know, I went from working at a company with 84,000 employees globally to a company with 40 total employees. So here’s my TLDR based on my personal experience (while I work on writing a larger blog post on this topic):

*Remember that Autonomy is 1/3 of finding a job you love. The other two are Competence and Relatedness.

Another big thing to consider is culture. While there’s no sure way to test or interview for it, it’s crucial to decide if you align with the culture at the company you’re looking to transition to – whether that’s a corporate or startup company.

Ultimately, choosing between a startup vs. corporate hinges on a fundamental question: What are your career aspirations, and what do you seek to achieve? In my case, I made the switch to try something new out and to avoid future regrets.

Would I make the same choice again? Yes, I probably would to add skills to my toolbelt, learn more about how different companies work, and gain experience wearing multiple hats and working across departments.

The key takeaway here is to reflect on your core values and priorities, whether it's time, freedom, career growth, family, learning, or other factors. Ask yourself what you value most to determine which career path is best for you.

Drop a question here to get an answer in a future newsletter: Link

Was it useful? Help us improve!

With your feedback, we can improve the letter. Click on a link to vote:

• 👍 That helped me. Thanks

• 😐 Meh - was ok.

• 👎 Not interesting to me.

P.S: I work hard to keep all the content on my website and my newsletters free so that it's accessible for everyone, but if you want to help support my writing endeavors, you can buy me a coffee.

Thank you for reading on! If you know any friends, family, or colleagues who would benefit from these insights, please feel free to share this newsletter with them! If this email was forwarded to you, consider subscribing to receive them in the future!