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...

I shared the first Student Deal Highlight a few months ago & it was quite large & unusual — a $140,874 profit. You can read more about it here.

Today I want to share with you another Student Deal Highlight in a typical profit range for deals done by our students.

After doing his first deal, this student said, “I learned in December about what Chris was doing to help pastors and missionaries create income streams for support. Having, myself, been in ministry for 45 years and being of kindred heart to do the same for ministers, I decided to take the course and give it a go. In a little more than 90 days since being introduced to the process, my first deal yielded $13,000 profit.”

Here are the details on his first deal.

Profit

He contracted the...

It’s a good question.

I certainly didn’t “have” to. I was paid full-time by our church and the elders were glad to continue paying me. There was no financial struggle involved.

So, why do it?

I’ll give you 4 reasons.

1. It’s a joy to do ministry for free.

   When we moved back to Lubbock after graduating from seminary to start our church, we had no income. Our sponsor church was unable to help us financially, so we had to raise our personal support and also a budget for the church.

   We had many generous people give to help fund a salary for me and my family and a start-up budget for our church.

   Once our church started, all of the tithes and offerings went directly to church ministries because my salary had been covered for the first 2 years. I loved this!

   After 2 years, the church had the funds to bring me on the payroll, and while I was grateful, I really enjoyed not being on the payroll. Soon after coming on the...

But, after using many different banks over the years, my favorite bank by far has been Chase.

Now, I know there’s not a “one size fits all” bank. For your purposes, your bank might be far better than Chase. But for my purposes, and I think the purposes of most people, Chase Bank is one of the best banks out there.

I know a lot of people will argue for a local bank, and I can understand the reasons, but I think national banks with local branches can accomplish most of the same things, and even more. And, if you think about it, a lot of the local banks end up getting bought out by national brands eventually anyways.

Here are 10 reasons why Chase is my favorite bank:

1. The Online Interface

   Most people these days do a lot of their banking online. They expect their bank to have a decent website. This is often NOT the case with local banks &...

My family and I have been traveling “nearly” free for years now. We’ve earned tens of thousands of dollars in free travel just by following a simple process.

I’ve written many blogs on the various details of this process, but today I’ll keep it big picture and show you how to get started.

Step 1: Watch and improve your credit score.

• Start by finding your credit score and working to improve it. I’ve written extensively about that here. Even if you have a very low credit score, you can still play the travel rewards game.

• Your credit score will determine what credit cards you can qualify for, and the higher the score, the better the cards you can get.

Step 2: Apply for a Chase credit card with a large welcome bonus.

• The welcome bonuses are the key to accumulating a lot of travel rewards quickly. A welcome bonus is essentially a big chunk of points they give you to incentivize you to apply for...

1. You don’t like the process of buying and selling houses.

   It probably goes without saying that if you don’t like real estate, you shouldn’t get into it. To get your license, you will have to take quite a few real estate courses and to keep your license, there will be continuing education every few years.

2. You have a close family member who is an agent.

   Because many of you would get your license mainly to represent close family members and friends on the side, there could be some family conflict if you take business away from the other family member. Of course it doesn’t have to be this way, but if the other close family member derives most of their income this way, they may feel threatened if you get your license. And they may worry that they’ll lose some of the business they would’ve otherwise received from the...

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...

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...

I want to start with a crazy one because it highlights the potential of real estate.

Let me give a disclaimer right here at the beginning.

Most deals among our students are not this big. Most students average deal size would be somewhere between $5,000-$20,000 (which is still really good, especially if you do one or a few each month). Several students have had six figure deals like the one I’m highlighting today, but it’s more uncommon. Still, it’s fun to hear the stories when they happen.

This student joined the Flip Hacking Course & Mastermind when he was overseas as a missionary. He was wanting to generate extra income to eventually replace the money he had raised to go overseas.

Here are the details:

Profit

He made $140,874 on this deal! Wow!

The whole Flip...

That’s simply not true. Tentmaking is not an all or nothing proposition. Some people want to continue getting paid by their ministry but want to generate some extra income from tentmaking for family vacations or other extra costs that might not fit in the budget. Tentmaking allows you to generate additional streams of income & how much you make in tentmaking is really up to you.

2. Tentmaking will take way too much time.

This is also a myth. I generate full-time income through tentmaking and it takes me a few hours each week. From the beginning of my tentmaking journey, I made sure I never spent so much time that I felt distracted from my ministry. I wanted tentmaking to be like a hobby and I only...