Our Journey Begins

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We decided six years ago to down size and move closer to family. This allowed us to go to one income while I finished grad school. Homes and cost of living was so low here. We never had a mortgage payment of $350 before! My husband has always been a “do it yourselfer” and with all of our free time living in a tiny town, we had all the time in the world.

With the slower pace of life and the low cost of living in a rural town we decided to make our “downsize” house one that we loved. So, we decided to do a complete renovation over the span of three years. We chose a little yellow 2 bed 1 bath house in town that needed a complete facelift. New bathroom, new kitchen, refinished hardwood floors, new vinyl siding, new roof… the list actually got pretty intensive.

With so much time on our hands, we started to think what it would be like to not have to work a 9 to 5 job anymore. How could we get out? What would it take to escape the rat race? We started listening to a lot of podcasts such as Bigger Pockets and Choose FI. We tuned into a lot of books on Audible like Simple Path to Wealth, The 4-Hour Work Week, and Set for Life. We were learning as much as we could about becoming financially independent through investing in real estate.

This first part of our journey, “the beginning”, will be laid out by project and we will discuss what went wrong, what went right and how we managed to get the project completed. We will tell you right now there was definitely a LOT of YouTube being watched! We did most of the work ourselves and our experiences cannot be duplicated, BUT they can be learned from (and may be down right shocking). Also, we want to be sure to mention, all of this was (and is) taking place while I was finishing grad school. We both work full time, very demanding jobs.

“In the truest sense, freedom cannot be bestowed; it must be achieved.” Franklin D. Roosevelt

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