Tentmaking Tips

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

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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
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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
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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

You can use it to make extra money and also reduce your monthly expenses to nearly $0/mo.

I shared in another post about our current house hack, and in this post I want to share about our previous house hack.

In order to take advantage of both house hacking benefits listed above, we knew we needed to do a few things:

1. We needed to find a house off-market at a good price so we could make extra money by selling it for a profit a few years later. We also wanted the house to require some updating so we could fix it up some & increase our profits even further.

2. We needed to find a house with some kind of detached structure that we could convert into habitable space.

3. We needed to live in an area where there was a high demand for rentals (like near a college campus).

Here’s how we were able to accomplish each of these:

1. My wife began door knocking in a neighborhood where we knew homes sold for a premium. S
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Direct mail, calls, texts, & web forms of marketing all work. But nothing is quite like being face-to-face.

The problem with face-to-face is it’s hard to scale. And because it’s hard to scale, you won’t have a lot of competition when you show up at someone’s doorstep.

We’ve bought so many houses this way, especially personal ones.

Here are some advantages:

1. People like selling their home, especially if it is sentimental, to people they know & trust.

   As you meet a homeowner at their door & build a relationship with them, you’ll often find that they become more comfortable with the idea of selling to someone they’ve met. When Realtors are involved, it’s more uncommon that the seller actually meets the buyer.

2. You’ll likely be able to buy the house without much competition because it’s
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*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 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