The Beyond Messy Beginning...

Before the leaks, before the tenant stories, before we even knew what we were doing… there was the moment when we actually bought the 8-unit and looking back now, I can honestly say it didn’t start from strength… it started from pure survival mode.

We were 30 years old. Both working full-time jobs, raising two kids who were 10 and 8 at the time. Life was busy, schedules were packed and financially… we were hanging on by a thread. We didn’t have an easy beginning. From day one it felt like we were fighting just to keep the lights on. We had already faced foreclosure once before on our personal home and barely made it through that storm.

There was no rainy-day fund, no savings account, no cushion or back up plan. We were living paycheck to paycheck and some months even that didn’t feel like enough. So the thought of buying a rental property let alone an 8-unit building using our personal home as collateral, the same home we had almost lost… felt either like the most genius idea we’d ever have or the biggest mistake of our lives. There really was no in-between.

The property was being sold to us for $110,000, which was a great price. Because it was an 8-unit, we had to take out a commercial loan, which required 20% down. That meant we needed over $22,000 just to get to closing and we didn’t have it. Not even close.We sat down with the seller and were completely honest. No pretending, no fluff. We told him we didn’t have the $22,000, but if he gave us time, we would find a way to come up with it. Truthfully, we didn’t have a plan just determination and a willingness to try. Somehow, he agreed to give us 9 months. We signed the sales agreement, and just like that, the clock started ticking.

To make it happen, we needed to save roughly $2,500 a month which felt impossible considering we were already struggling to pay our own bills. But we were committed. And when I say we cut back… I mean we cut back hard. There were a lot of bologna sandwiches, SpaghettiOs and the cheapest meals we could stretch. No splurging, no eating out, no extras, no vacations. Every spare dollar went into that fund. Paycheck after paycheck we put money aside, feeling the stress build with every deposit. We were sick to our stomachs half the time wondering what we had gotten ourselves into and whether we’d actually make it.We saved spare change. Used tax returns. Skipped anything that wasn’t survival. And somehow I still don’t know how some days we did it. We came up with the money for the down payment right on time.

We walked into closing a little over confident. We had the money. We made it. We survived the hardest part… or so we thought. Then we sat down to sign the papers and the bank dropped a bomb on us, they wouldn’t finance the deal without a co-signer. Our credit was still recovering from past financial struggles and in their eyes we were too risky. I remember that feeling instantly defeated. After nine months of scraping and sacrificing, the deal was about to fall apart at the closing table. We had no one to ask. No backup plan. No investor. No family member waiting in the wings.

And then something happened that still sounds unbelievable when we tell the story today. The seller spoke up and offered to co-sign on the property… the same property he was selling to us. Yes you read that correctly. If we defaulted, he’d be on the line too. It didn’t make sense on paper. It wasn’t clean or traditional, but it was the only way the deal would go through. We agreed we would refinance after one year to remove his name and take full liability ourselves.The entire process was far from ideal. It wasn’t pretty. Honestly, it was a downright mess. But without that messy, stressful, imperfect beginning we would have never taken the biggest step of our lives.

That 8-unit didn’t just start our real estate journey… it proved to us that sometimes the decisions that feel the scariest, the ones that keep you up at night and makes you question everything are the very ones that end up changing your life.

And standing where we are today, I can say this with certainty…

If we had waited until we were “financially ready”…

We would have never started at all.