Tentmaking Tips

*Note: This blog is geared toward our American friends, but those of you reading from around the world might also have a similar benefit in your tax code.

The IRS wants to give you a generous gift.

I know that’s hard to believe.

Yet, so few people take advantage of it on a regular basis.

I’m talking about Publication 523 in the IRS code on the Home Sale Exclusion.

Here’s basically how it works:

If you’ll buy a home & live in it as your primary residence for at least 2 years, then when you go to sell it, you can take up to $500,000 profit TAX FREE for married couples ($250,000 for singles).

You might want to read that again.

Since when do you ever get tax free profit on anything?

Yet, in this case, the IRS will give you tax free profit on the sale of your home as long as you meet certain qualifications.

Here they are:

1. You must not have bo
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I bet you can guess her answer.

We spent some time looking at the Travel + Leisure best places to visit website and consistently found Charleston, South Carolina on many of the lists.

My wife was eager to head to the east coast around the time the leaves would be changing colors. We had never been to Charleston before, so we booked the trip.

Here are the details:

• We had generated enough Chase UR points (Ultimate Rewards) to be able to transfer them 1:1 to both Southwest and Hyatt. Southwest & Hyatt are both travel partners of Chase, so we could simply go to Chase’s Ultimate Rewards website, click on Transfer to Travel Partners, & transfer 1,000+ Chase points for 1,000+ Southwest or Hyatt points.

• We flew from Lubbock, with a stop in Dallas, on the way to Charleston. The number of Southwest points we needed was about 25,000 points each. At that time we didn't h
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If you want to learn more about Financial Independence, check out my post, Introduction to the F.I.R.E. Community.

Here’s the gist of the 4% Rule.

• The 4% Rule refers to the Trinity Study, which was an influential paper from 1998 written by three professors at Trinity University. One of the topics the paper dealt with was “safe withdrawal rates.” In other words, how much money could you draw out of in
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As I was putting the totals in during our final 2021 payroll cycle, I was amazed once again at the amount of money you can make as a Realtor just doing a few transactions a year.

All of the people working actively in our brokerage who earned income this year were doing it on the side. It was a supplement to their income (or their spouse’s).

I averaged all of their earnings together for 2021 because some did more transactions & some did less.

Guess what the average was?

$53,806

Wow!

Now of course we also have agents that are just starting that haven’t done their first deal yet, but for those who are active in doing deals, they averaged $53,806 in extra income for their families in 2021 just doing it on the side.

None of them were doing this full-time. Some did just a few trans

Direct mail refers to any type of mail piece you send directly to a seller. It could be a letter, a postcard, a brochure, or any other type of mail piece.

I can’t even tell you the number of houses we’ve bought by sending people letters & postcards. It’s likely more than 100 by now. We’ve bought both personal homes & investment property this way.

Our best-performing letter usually had a picture of our family at the top & a short note letting the seller know we were looking for a house to buy in their neighborhood. We’d mention some of the benefits of selling to us like:

• Not having to pay 6% in real estate commissions

• Not having the hassle of listing it, cleaning it up & showing it

• Not having to worry about making any repairs

• Not having to wait for a long closing process

And so forth.

Then we’d put our contact informat

I shared in a recent blog post, A Closer Look at Our Latest House Hack, that we recently finished renovating our single-car garage into a guest house. We were planning to use it for family, friends, & guests on Airbnb.

In our first 2 stays on Airbnb, we had a 30-day and a 31-day booking. In each of those stays, we made almost double what we made per month in our previous Airbnb. We were hoping to continue the 30-day booking streak when the Lord put something in our path we couldn't ignore.

We received an email from a campus ministry informing us that the university near our house was planning to scholarship 5 Afghan girls to come to college here & finish their education. These girls were in the middle of a degree plan in Afghanistan but had to flee the country when the Taliban took control in August 2021. They knew that the opportunity for women to get an educ

The Southwest Companion pass truly is an amazing travel reward!

In fact, it's the gift that keeps on giving.

You can get it again, and again, and again. And not just you. Your spouse can get it too.

My wife and I have both had a Companion Pass for the last 2 years and we are about to renew my wife’s for another 2 years. That means that both of our daughters have traveled free as our companions on all of the trips we've been on the last few years.

How cool is that?

Here are the details.

You are allowed to receive the welcome bonuses on the Southwest cards once in a 24 month period. If you earn the bonuses on both a Southwest personal & business card right at the beginning of the year (and reach the 125,000 points), you'll have the Companion Pass for the rest of that year & all of the following year (nearly 2 years). By the time your Compani

It's so sought after that I've heard it called the "holy grail" of travel rewards.

What is it, you may ask?

The Southwest Airlines Companion Pass.

Everyone wants one, but they can be tricky to get.

In case you don't know what it is, the Southwest Companion Pass allows you to take a companion for free on as many Southwest flights as you'd like during the duration of the pass.

It's basically a free ticket anytime you fly for someone to join you.

The way you typically get the Companion Pass is by "flying 100 qualifying one-way flights or earning 125,000 qualifying points in a calendar year." That's straight off the Southwest website.

If you do one of these two things, you'll earn a Companion Pass "for the following full calendar year, plus the remainder of the year in which you earned it."

To most people, this seems impossible.

You'd have to fly nearly 10 times per month to hit the 100 fligh

This shouldn't surprise us.

Solomon said, "The rich rule over the poor, and the borrower is slave to the lender." (Prov 22:7)

The implication here is that you're probably not going in the right direction financially if you're a financial slave to someone else.

Just a few verses later, Solomon again warns of the danger, "Do not be one who shakes hands in pledge or puts up security for debts; if you lack the means to pay, your very bed will be snatched from under you." (Prov 22:26-27)

That's scary. Who wants their bed snatched from under them? Solomon is trying to warn his listeners about the potential consequences of going into debt & not being able to repay. Perhaps his warning will cause his listeners to rethink "shaking hands in a pledge" by going into debt.

I think he's suggesting we ask the question, "If you go into debt, how do you know you'll have the means to repay?"

In other words, we're

Let's just assume you don't want to Flip Hack, House Hack, or even Agent Hack (represent your family and friends as a real estate agent).

There's still a way you can make extra income from real estate.

Referral Fees.

What you may not know is that when one agent refers a lead to another agent, the referring agent will often be rewarded with a percentage of the commission (often 25%).

You must be a licensed agent to get this referral fee, but you don't actually have to represent any clients to make this extra money. And getting your license is a fairly quick & easy process. See the post entitled, The Best Places to Get Your Real Estate License.

We have a neighbor that does this exact thing. She was an active real estate agent for years, but now that she's older, she really doesn't want to be active in the business anymore. But, of course, she'd still love to make some extra money. The w