Tentmaking Tips

I tell them I’m glad to help. Then, I direct them to the free resources we offer like:

• Our weekly Tentmaking Tips newsletter

• Daily tweets/threads about earning extra income

• Step-by-step guides to earning thousands in extra income and free vacations

But it’s usually the case that they want to pay extra for additional courses & coaching.

I tell them about some of our paid products and then share the ways they can get those free as well.

After all, if I’m teaching hacks to get free travel or live nearly free, shouldn’t I give hacks for getting my paid content for free? Ha!

Here are the ways I tell them they can get any or all of our courses for free (and you could too):

1. Follow my step-by-step guide to earn an extra $1,200 quickly and apply that to any or all of the courses

2. Refer 3 friends to any course and get all of the course cost refunded to you
...

If you’re like most people, probably not.

Houses usually don’t put money in your pocket each month, they take money out of your pocket each month.

Well, I’ve got good news.

You can change that.

It’s called House Hacking.

It’s using your house to earn extra income and reduce or eliminate your housing expenses.

Our last 2 guests to stay in our guest house paid us $6,121 and $3,797 respectively.

And what did it require of us?

Nothing really. Just cleaning up & letting them stay with us.

These two guests paid all of my property taxes & insurance for the entire year, with money to spare.

And this isn’t just a fluke. We’ve been doing it for years.

How do we do it?

Simple.

Move into houses with detached structures that we can convert into guest houses (or that have already been converted).

And that’s not the only way to do it.

I have a pastor friend who bought a tiny home to put in his backyard. They shipped it to him on a truck & he plans t

Some of the common misconceptions of getting stated in real estate are:

• I need to go into lots of debt

• I need to understand the real estate market

• I need to be able to understand the inner workings of complicated contracts

• I need to be good at construction

• I need to be good at decorating

• I need to have a lot of money

These are misconceptions that keep many people from getting started in real estate.

I’d like to use this newsletter to give you 6 simple ways to get started in real estate (in no particular order):

1. Buy a fixer upper & update it while you live there

   We’ve done this many times and made a significant profit when we sold. And I’m not handy at all. We hired everything out. What’s great is that if you live there at least 2 years, the profit is tax free up to a certain amount. We call these “live-in flips.”

2. Airbnb something on your own property

   There are so many ways to make money on Airbnb using yo

   ...

A home built in the 1930s just hit the market. The owners haven’t done many updates to the inside but they converted one of the detached garages to an Airbnb. They’ve had it listed on Airbnb for the last 18 months and they attached an Excel spreadsheet to the listing with how much they’ve made per month.

Guess what they are averaging per month?

$2,500!!!

I’m sure that covers their mortgage and then some!

What could you do with an extra $2,500 per month? Cover your mortgage? Cover your utilities? Cover other payments? I’m sure you could think of something!

What did they do to generate this extra income that they’ve made consistently for the last 18 months?

Honestly, not much!

1. They bought a house with a detached structure that could be
...

1. It reduces the property tax portion of your mortgage payment, or if you don’t have a mortgage, it reduces your yearly property tax expense.

2. It allows your “house hack” to go further because you have less housing expense to cover.

3. It speeds up your journey to financial independence because you’ve reduced your total monthly expenses.

Ok, so how should you go about it?

Most people are not actively thinking about their property taxes and believe it’s just a necessary expense of owning a home that they have no control over. But that’s not true. You have a lot more influence over your property taxes than you may think.

I want to share 4 ways to reduce your property taxes.

1. Make sure you have applied for a homestead exemption

   This is an easy step, but very important. Some people don’t know about this & pay way too much in property taxes as a result.

   A homestead exemp

   ...

Now, I know what some of you are thinking.

“I don’t have a guest house.”

“I don’t want strangers in my house.”

“I don’t have the time to manage it.”

The truth is, Airbnb is flexible. You can make money on Airbnb in so many different ways. Most of your initial objections could likely be overcome.

Since you already own your property (land and home), you might as well make some money off of it & let it pay its own bills.

Let me give you some different ways people make money on Airbnb using their own property.

1. Rent out a room on Airbnb
   1. Don’t get tripped up here. This is not the only option. But this is a great option for some.
   2. When my parents would drive 5 hours to visit my sister, my Mom would usually stay at her house, but my Dad would find another place to stay to have a bit more room.
   3. One of his favorite place
   ...

Here’s what I told them (and what I’d tell you):

1. Sell it “For Sale By Owner”
   1. In other words, try to avoid real estate agents. Just to clarify, we love real estate agents around this blog. I’m an agent and so is my wife. We also have a brokerage that employees agents. Nothing against agents, but you often won’t make the most money if you use them (especially at full commission on both sides of the transaction). Real estate commissions will eat up a huge chunk of your profits.
   2. The summary of how you sell it by owner is: buy a FSBO (For Sale By Owner) sign at Home Depot and put it in your front yard, post your home for sale on sites like Zillow, Redfin, Trulia, etc, take phone calls, set-up showings, accept an offer on the property, and then close a month or so later. I’ll go into more detail in the following points.

2. Have it staged
   1. I
   ...

Staging is the process of furnishing and decorating a house to appeal to current retail buyers.

One mistake people make when they sell their homes, in my opinion, is selling it vacant or with furnishings/decor that won’t appeal to buyers.

Sometimes people think that moving all of their furniture/decor out & selling it vacant is best because the buyer will see it as a blank slate. In most cases, this isn’t true. Or people think that they have great taste & just leaving their stuff in there should be fine. This can also be untrue.

Most buyers will pay more for a house that is professionally furnished & decorated, also known as being “staged.”

A seller in my neighborhood, who is also a real estate agent, recently had an updated rental property he wanted to sell. The tenant had just moved out, so the house was vacant. He also believed it was not ideal to sell it vacant. He told me he

I’d love to help.

By tentmaking, we mean earning money to support your ministry from outside your ministry. This could be supplemental income if you already have a ministry income. Or it could completely replace a ministry income and you could derive all of your income outside of your ministry.

Here are 4 steps to begin a tentmaking journey:

1. Determine how much extra income you need

Are you just needing an extra $5,000 each year? Or are you needing part-time income? Or do you need full-time income? This will help you decide what types of tentmaking opportunities to pursue.

2. Determine how much time you have to generate this extra income

Do you only have a few hours available each week or could you spend more time? Depending on the type of ministry you’re in now, you may either have quite a bit of flexibility to pursue tentmaking on the side or you may have very little. Knowing

I’ll give you one guess which situation the housing market is in right now.

People are greedy!

The market has been incredibly hot.

The median home price in the US has increased around 15% from this time last year. 15%!!!! In some markets, it’s way above this! Whoa!!

You’ve probably heard that many homes are selling far above the list price. And, often, there is a bidding war that decides who wins.

In our part of the country, I’ve heard of homebuilders having auctions to sell their new houses. And the highest bidder has to waive the appraisal contingency to win. In other words, the builder knows you are paying so much money, the bank will never appraise it for that price. So they make you waive the contingency so you don’t opt out when the appraisal comes in low. You have to come up with the difference in cash.

It’s a great time to be a seller and a tough time to be a buyer. The p