Tentmaking Tips

Prior to this story I'm about to tell, we had flipped our own house several times (live-in flips). I often refer to that process as House Hacking.

But I'm going to tell you about the first flip we did of a house that we didn't live in. This is what I often refer to as Flip Hacking. We specifically bought this house to flip it & sell it soon after.

It will probably help you to read the blog post entitled "3 Ways to Flip a House" first, if you haven't already. That will explain some of the terminology I use in this post.

Here's the story:

My wife told me about a house she really loved in a great neighborhood we had lived in before. The house wasn't currently for sale, but I contacted the owner anyway to see if he'd be interested in selling. The timing was perfect & the owner let us know he had been thinking about selling soon & liked the idea of selling

It’s not really an every day tool like a budgeting app. It’s a tool I’ll glance at monthly or every few months.

The focus of this tool is on tracking your net worth. Your net worth, as calculated by this tool, are your assets minus your liabilities. You can import all of your asset accounts and all of your liability accounts into this tool and it gives you a big picture view of your financial health.

As you think ahead toward retirement & financial freedom, you want to see your net worth number growing over time. This gives you a good indication that you'll be financially prepared for the time in your life when you don't have any income coming in from your job.

Types of assets you can import:

• Bank accounts (cash)

• Investment accounts (IRAs/401ks/HSAs/529s/stocks/bonds, etc)

• Real estate (primary home & rental property)

• Cars

• Jewelry/Art

• Businesses

• You can eve
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Well, I’ve got good news! There are other alternatives that can save you potentially thousands of dollars, even tens of thousands of dollars. Remember, Realtors make money as a percentage of your purchase price (often 6%), which can add up fast.

Here are a few of your other options:

1. Consult with a family member or friend who has done a FSBO transaction before. They can guide you through the process.

2. Call a local Title Company and they'll be glad to help because they make money when they close the transaction. They'll often give you the standard forms to use along with some tips on which sections to pay attention to.

3. If you want to spend a few hundred bucks to make sure everything is exactly right (which I recommend
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I didn't have bad credit, I just had no credit. This was because I hadn't had any debt in years & I had never even had a personal credit card before.

My credit score really didn't matter to me because I didn't ever plan to borrow money for anything.

But, that did mean I couldn't apply & be approved for some of the best travel cards. That wasn't a big deal, but it did interest me in bumping up my credit score to qualify for these cards. The best cards often require a fairly high credit score, usually 750+.

Here's how I went from no credit to a credit score of over 800 (while still remaining debt free):

1. I opened an entry-level card with USAA, my auto/homeowners insurance provider. They were willing to let me open a card with no credit due to my long payment history of my insurance premiums. But it didn't have great travel benefits & my credit limit was extremely low, I think aroun
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This passage runs contrary to ministry culture in the US and probably challenges our paradigms.

Paul, a successful church planter & author of much of our New Testament, is making tents? Surely if anyone deserves a full-time paid salary, it's Paul. Paul even talked about how he had the right to support from churches as a traveling preacher (1 Cor 9), but in some cases "did not use this right" because he didn't want anything to "hinder the gospel of Christ." He wanted to preach the gospel "free of charge."

Paul told the Ephesian elders:

I have not coveted anyone’s silv...

The financially wise person will usually tell you to keep those funds liquid in preparation for a rainy day (car breaks down, AC goes out, etc). Meaning, don't lock them away in investments where you can't easily access them or where they could lose money.

The only problem with this is that parking these funds in your checking or savings account usually yields very little interest. In fact, the currently advertised interest rate on my bank's savings account is 0.01%. Ha!

I realize this rate will fluctuate depending on interest rates and market conditions, but it leaves those of us with emergency funds looking around for better options.

Enter HYSAs. Heard of them? The acronym stands for High Yield Savings Accounts.

I'm const

If that's you, I want to explain it in this post.

I think understanding how Realtors make money will show you why I recommend becoming a Realtor (or having your spouse become one) as part of your tentmaking strategy.

Realtors make money, not based on the time they put in, but based on the value of the houses that they sell/buy for their clients. Meaning, in most cases, Realtors are not paid hourly or by salary, but rather as a percentage of the sales price of the house.

What's great about this is that you can make extra money with minimal time investment, which is exactly what many of us in ministry are looking for. For example, I put together a free guide on how you can make an extra $10,000 each year with approximately 10 hours of work using a real estate license. You can download it here.

Let me give a specific example of how Realtors make money using a hypothetical transaction.

The median home

You see these properties around you every day, but you probably aren't accustomed to seeing them as an opportunity to earn extra income on the side to support your ministry.

Let's discuss this.

So, what is a distressed property?

Here are common exterior signs that could indicate distress:

• Grass overgrown/landscape deterioration

• Trees hanging down into the yard

• Significant peeling paint/fascia damage

• Boarded up windows/very old windows

• Siding/brick deterioration

• Loose/missing shingles

• Trash strewn across the property

• Mail overflowing from mailbox

• Garage door in disrepair

This list could go on, but you get the idea. You're looking for properties whose exterior shows that the home probably needs some work. Often the exterior gives you a good idea of what the interior is like.

Distressed property owners sometimes want a cash-paying investor t

One of the reasons we chose this home is because we knew we could live here for free.

You're probably thinking, "What?!?!"

I'm talking about House Hacking.

House Hacking is essentially using your house to make extra money & live nearly free.

I'll share some about the "living nearly free" part in this post.

When we were looking for a house, we knew we wanted to find a place that had a detached garage or storage building that we could convert into habitable space to use as a short-term rental.

We also wanted to make sure it was located in an area where people would be looking for a place to rent, like near a university.

The house we found was a historic house built around 1920 (my wife loves historic homes). It had a detached single-car garage in the back and it was one block from a major university.

We knew that over time we could convert the garage, and through a service like Airbnb, begin to host guests & make extra money e

I wasn’t planning to come back to it so quickly but they just started offering their highest welcome bonus ever. It actually says "Best Offer Ever" on their website & many of the travel rewards bloggers are going crazy about it.

Some of you have been texting me to make sure I saw it. I definitely did.

The Welcome Bonus if you get the Chase Sapphire Preferred right now is 100,000 points. You might want to read that last sentence again. 100,000 points!!!

For perspective, when I got this card a few years ago, it was 50,000 points. When my wife got it, it was also 50,000 points. The offer right now is double what we received as a Welcome Bonus.

The requirement is that you have to spend $4,000 on this card in the first 3 months after you open it to earn this bonus. Not hard for most. Just throw as many expenses as you can on this c