TwentyFrugal

My wife and I moved into our first house in May and immediately started doing our own updates. Because we spent most of our savings buying the house, we wanted to keep the updates as affordable as possible. The kitchen was fairly builder-grade with the classic metal sink and all white appliances. Here is what it looked like before we started.  We took down all of the cabinet doors and painted them glossy white. We ordered some really affordable pulls from Amazon. They were $30 for 25 pulls!  We ordered some Feather Finish concrete and watched a ton of YouTube videos to learn how to concrete our countertops. While we were going, I made the call to go ahead and concrete our metal sink too. I hadn’t seen anyone do it but I thought it was worth a shot.  By the end of the project, we ended up only spending about $200 on pulls, concrete, polyurethane to seal the concrete, a $70 sink from Amazon, and a nifty new soap dispenser. Here our our final results!

My wife and I are in the process of purchasing our first rental property! Here is how we have done it step by step, and what we are going to do next! Step 1: Identifying our mark et The first thing we wanted to do was identify a market that we believe is emerging as opposed to emerged. We were looking at properties in our town and noticing they were priced higher and higher than we believed they were worth, then selling over asking price in a matter of days. Since we are going for a buy and hold investment strategy, we did not care for these high demand quick selling houses. Instead, we wanted to find a market that needed more rentals and had markets that typically foster tenants instead of homeowners. In a neighboring town, we found an area with a great downtown with shops and restaurants, an undergraduate university with a developing graduate program, a hospital, multiple large churches, and plenty of businesses.  Step 2: Secure Private Lending We reached out to family that has d...