- Mortgage payment (principal + interest)
- Property Taxes
- Homeowners Insurance
#2 & #3 are often rolled into your mortgage payment and escrowed for you until they are due.
Chances are these 3 together are anywhere from $1,000-$2,000/mo, depending on where you live and how much of a loan you took out to buy your house.
Can you imagine if that $1k-2k/mo payment was reduced to nearly $0/mo? Life-changing, right? I’m sure you can think of some other things you’d like to do with that money each month.
The solution: House Hacking
In other words, use/hack your house to earn the extra income needed to pay for your primary housing expenses. Or move to a house that can generate the extra income.
There are many creative ways to do this. Here are a some examples:
- Convert the storage building in your backyard to habitable space and rent it on Airbnb.
- Build a tiny home in your backyard and use Zillow to lease it full-time to a college student.
- Buy a duplex/triplex/quadriplex and live in one unit while renting out the other units
- Rent out an extra bedroom to a friend
Our family has done this in 2 different ways:
- Converted a storage area behind our garage to an efficiency and rented it on Airbnb (we averaged $1,200/mo which easily covered all of our housing expenses) -- you can see the picture of this one at the top of the blog
- Converted a detached single-car garage behind our house to habitable space to rent out to professors & visitors to a nearby college (just beginning but should also average at least $1,200/mo)
*Disclaimer: Always check the codes in your area to see what types of rentals are allowed.
Because we want to keep our primary housing expenses near $0 every month, anytime we move we make sure there’s an easy way to rent something out on our property to cover our housing costs.
You can too!
