BiggerPockets Real Estate Podcast - 783.3: Home Buying Hacks: Down Payments, Financing, and Home Insurance w/Chris Hutchins

Episode Date: June 27, 2023

Part 3: Struggling to buy in this expensive housing market? In part three of our home buying hacks series with Chris Hutchins (from All the Hacks), you’ll learn why down payments AREN’T as big as you think, why working with a mortgage broker may be the best move to make, what lenders want to see before they pre-approve you, and home insurance tips to make sure you’re protected during a disaster.  In This Episode We Cover: Debt-to-income requirements and what lenders want to see when you apply for a loan Using a mortgage broker vs. a direct lender (and which will get you a better rate) Home insurance 101 and how to protect your property for less money  The math behind buying a house (and why it beats renting in the long run)  And So Much More! Links from the Show Find an Agent Find a Lender BiggerPockets Youtube Channel BiggerPockets Forums BiggerPockets Pro Membership BiggerPockets Bookstore BiggerPockets Bootcamps BiggerPockets Podcast BiggerPockets Merch BPCON2023 Listen to All Your Favorite BiggerPockets Podcasts in One Place Learn About Real Estate, The Housing Market, and Money Management with The BiggerPockets Podcasts Get More Deals Done with The BiggerPockets Investing Tools Find a BiggerPockets Real Estate Meetup in Your Area David's BiggerPockets Profile David's Instagram David’s YouTube Channel Work with David Pick Up Some of David Greene’s Best Selling Books Rob's BiggerPockets Profile Rob's Instagram Rob's TikTok Rob's Twitter Rob's YouTube Past BiggerPockets Podcast Episodes Mentioned: How to Start with $10K House Hacking Tax Benefits Hear Chris on The "BiggerPockets Money" Podcast “All the Hacks” Episodes Mentioned: Insurance Net Fulfillment Over Net Worth Tune Into the “All the Hacks” Podcast Enter to Win a FREE Copy of David's New Book, "Pillars of Wealth" Connect with Chris Chris email Click here to listen to the full episode: https://www.biggerpockets.com/blog/real-estate-783-3 Interested in learning more about today’s sponsors or becoming a BiggerPockets partner yourself? Email [e-mail]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome back to our three-part home buying hacks series, where we are giving away all the hacks at every stage of the home buying process. We're here with Chris Hutchins, host of the excellent podcast, All the Hacks. So in our last segment, we broke down insider secrets for listing, inspection, and due diligence. Now we'll get into the financials, why down payments aren't as big as you think, what lenders want to see before they pre-approve you, home insurance tips, and why you should not wait to buy. All right, let's get into it. You ever head out on a trip, lock your door, and think, cool. My most valuable asset is now doing absolutely nothing. Because while you're off traveling, your home is just sitting there.

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I'm curious if there are any last things that you try to negotiate for. For me, I always had this rule when I bought a car that's like try to get them to throw in the floor mats. And for the home, I always love getting a little extra at the end of the deal because, you know, you're looking at a house. The cost to throw in a few things is so small that even if someone's not willing to negotiate, you could sometimes get it. So we got all the lime trees that were technically staging. included in our house. There was a nice stage TV in the living room. We got that thrown in.

So I always like to throw in a little bit, a few small things that at the end of the day, no one's going to kind of blow a deal up over something small, but it feels really good. Every time we walk through our living room, I'm like, I didn't pay for that TV. Like, that TV was free. Yeah, I paid for the TV. I bought the house, but I feel like I didn't pay for the TV. And one that I've recently come across. So depending on how much you care about privacy and whatnot, I'm now in a situation where I'd prefer the whole world doesn't know where I live. And so one thing that you can do in advance, because it's a lot of work if you don't, is put into the contract that the agent needs to

remove all of the home data, photos, descriptions from the MLS. Sometimes it can be a hassle to get them to go do it after the fact. But if you don't want all the pictures of the interior house online, you can write that into a contract, which is something that took me time, but I didn't do in advance. And if you really want to be private and you want to buy a home in an LLC so that you can you kind of protect your identity where you are, you can't do that later. Like the records will always be there if you didn't do that in advance. So if you're in a situation where you think one day in the near future, you might not want people to find your address, buy the home and the LLC in advance.

Don't, don't buy it after, don't try to change that after the fact. Because I have at least one friend who ended up just having to move because someone knew where this address was and, you know, there wasn't really anything you can do at that point. So those are a couple of mine. Any other small quick wins that you can get when you're negotiating. I think those are all pretty good. I think we covered basically everything. We talked about seller credits. I think it's important to note that you can have a little bit of flexibility with seller credits. Like let's say you can't see eye to eye with the seller and they don't want to give you a $5,000 seller to repair this one kind of thing that you think is a big deal. You could in theory raise the price by $5,000 and then have them give you a credit for $5,000. And while they're not paying it for you, throwing that on to your mortgage is really going to have a pretty minimal effect on your overall payment. I mean, probably less than a dollar is my guess. I don't really know. But that's always something you can

do to if you need to make a deal work and you're really like, hey, this $5,000 is going to kill the deal. You can always add it to the price of the house if you feel like you're getting a good enough deal. As a good strategy, especially if you don't have a ton of capital. In general, having 510, 15 grand in the bank is a more value to you than having 510 or 15 grand added on to a $600,000 mortgage balance. when it comes to extras that you mentioned, Chris, one of the best things to do is to have your agent ask the listing agent, is there anything that the sellers don't want to have to move? You wouldn't think that would be a common thing,

but many times sellers, their biggest concern is I don't want to move all my crap. And if they don't want to take the bunk beds with them, or they have some patio furniture in the backyard that they were planning on replacing when they got something new or they don't really love their couch, it's not worth moving because they have to spend a bunch of money to get it from one place to another, they may be happy to leave it for you. So just getting a list from them or what are all the things you don't want to take

regarding furniture or stuff like that is something that you can get added. Like with you what you mentioned, Chris, sometimes there's TVs that they were just going to get a new TV when they got to the new house. And you can have that added and just end up with some extra things to throw throughout the house. Doesn't hurt to ask. Love that. Robbie, you talked about mortgages.

Let's talk quickly about financing. I know it's a big thing. Anything people need to be thinking about. as they go through this process, getting a loan, getting pre-qualified, figuring out what they can afford. Yeah, I think probably the, I mean, there's a couple ways to look at it, right? So if you're buying conventionally, they're typically going to look at what's called your debt to income ratio. So this is how much money you're paying every single month to debt servicers versus how much income you make. And I believe this is gross, gross income. So let's say you make $10,000 a month,

but all of your credit cards and your student loan payments and your car payments and the couch that you finance adds up to $4,500. month, that means that your debt to income ratio is 45%. And David, you probably know the exact number here, but typically lenders don't want you to have higher than a 45% DTI to make a deal work. Is that the correct figure, David? It's sometimes lower than that, but that's like the ceiling is high as most of them will go. Yeah. So you want to make sure that when you're analyzing a deal and seeing what you can qualify for, I mean, all lenders are basically going to run this calculation for you. but just to put it into perspective,

you don't want the payment of the house that you're buying to throw your DTI out of whack, right? If you're barely qualifying now, the debt that you're going to have from the house that you're buying contributes to that DTI and what you're qualifying for. So make sure that that's something that you can kind of hone in ahead of time and certainly don't go take out new credit cards and fill them up to buy new furniture before you close.

That's a big mistake that I think a lot of people make, you know, on their first property. Opening any line of credit is going to screw up your debt to income ratio. And it often happens once the house is an escrow, now let's buy a new car to drive into our new garage. Let's go open a line of credit to buy a bunch of furniture. You're so excited. And then the entire escrow gets blown up because you were just at the peak of what you could afford to that new line of credit put you over. Yeah.

I mean, I'm a big fan of the points game and opening up cards and sign up bonuses. But when we're buying a home, it's like let's put a hold on all of that, you know, six months out just so I kind of have a nice clean slate there. and I'm not trying to take on any extra inquiries or anything like that. When you're helping people find homes or looking for mortgages yourself, do you think a broker is an important part of that equation or not? It's something I've never actually worked with. I've always gone direct to a handful of financial institutions. Yeah, and disclaimer, I am a mortgage broker, so I am partial towards them.

But here's why I went that route instead of becoming what we call direct lender. So what a lot of people do is they'll go to Wells Fargo, they'll go to Chase, they'll go to Bank of America, and they'll say, what can you do? What's your rate? What are your closing costs? And it gives you this feeling of productivity that you're out there shopping around. But as a broker, we're doing the same thing. We're going to Bank America. We're going to Chase. We're going to all the same lenders you have, but they're probably giving us better pricing than you. And this is one of the kind of like the shady things about how the loan industry works. When you walk into Bank of America, because that's where

you bank and you know them and you're comfortable with them, they know that you're going to bank with them because you're comfortable. They don't have to give you the best deal. But when they're working with a broker, they know that we are comparing them to all the other lending options. So they're going to have to give us a good deal to get the business. So going to a broker will allow you to have them shop for all your different loan products and options that are available, save you time and they're usually going to get better pricing. And do can a broker still get deals where they're required to put a certain amount of assets at that institution? I know, at least with Wells Fargo, as your example, if you move some money into a brokerage account with

Wells Fargo, you get a better rate. Do you? Do you? brokers still negotiate those kind of deals as well? Those are uncommon now. We were seeing those with Jumbo loans. There was a time where you could get a better rate on a Jumbo loan if you put a significant amount of money in with the bank. And we would just tell our clients like, hey, if you're looking for a Jumbo loan in this market, it's not the case right now, but at the time, especially during COVID, you're better off just to go to that bank. You're going to get a better rate on Jumbo products than you would be right here. But you're going to have to put $100,000 in a bank. They're going to schedule a meeting for you with one of their financial advisors because they want you to

take that $100,000 and go buy mutual funds through them and they're going to make money. that way. So if you get an honest broker, like we don't want to waste our time working on somebody who we can't get them a good loan product. We're pretty good at just telling people up front, this is for what you want to do, we don't have a product like that. For years, we didn't do commercial lending. So we would refer people to the best commercial lender we do. And so we got set up with the commercial lender and now we can do it. So if you do have one of those special opportunities, like sometimes physicians can get special loans through a credit union that is geared towards physicians. Yes.

there's an angle, but for your average person, there's not a ton of those opportunities. And David, just for reference, what makes something a jumbo loan? Yeah, that's a good point. Every area has a difference, what they call it, like a conforming limit. This is how much you can borrow before it's considered to be risky. So you're a mortgage broker or a loan officer can tell you what the Fannie Mae Freddie Mac guidelines are for that area. You might even be able to look that up online. But a loan balance above a certain amount, depending, it's obviously higher in the Bay Area, California than it's going to be in Topeka, Kansas. But it's a proportional amount. And then once you have to get a loan balance higher than that,

you're not going to get a Fannie Mae Freddie back loan. You're going to get a loan that comes from private investors that have pooled their money in capital markets. They're going to give you the loan, then they're going to sell that as a mortgage back security somewhere else. So that's why the rates are usually a little bit higher on jumbo loans. They're riskier for the person lending you the money. I think in the Bay Area, it's like high six figures is the, threshold, I think. It goes up every year, usually, too. Okay. Yeah, it's been a few years for me. And how do you think about how much people should be putting down? Or maybe if you have a different thing, you can. I think that's going to probably depend on the use case, right? So if it's a primary,

you can get into a primary for as low as three and a half percent down, unless it's a jumbo loan. I think, I don't think you can do that. There are limits on those as well, the FHA Fannie Fannie Mae guideline. So make sure to look those up. Those are pretty easy to look up. I think it's totally fine to get into your starter home for three and a half percent. I did. I got into my first $159,000 house for like six or seven grand. And, you know, that house ended up sort of being the catalyst for my entire portfolio. I think if you're looking at investment properties, you could go as low as 10% with the second home loan. That's still going to be under your name and your income and everything like that. And then once you go to that traditional route,

if you're going more traditional real estate, 20% down seems to be the gold standard. You could sometimes it's going to be asked that you do 25%. Not really a fan of putting 25% down personally. If I can get in for 10% on a second home loan, pretty happy, I'll do 20% though on an investment loan that seems to be more common these days. So I like to put that into an apples to apples comparison. In general, if you're an investor or like a real estate investor, having more capital is better. But it depends where interest rates are. So for example, when rates are at 6%, to save an extra $40,000 and put that towards your down payment is going to save you.

$240 a month. When rates were at 3%, it would only save you $169 a month. So we saw this phenomena where people were trying to save more money to get their payment lower, get their payment lower, but prices were rising faster than they could save money. It actually ended up being a poor financial decision to try to save more money to put money down. So if rates, you know, if they jump up to say 12%, now you're talking about $411 a month, That might make sense to put more money down. But interest rates, though, they're higher than they were.

They are still traditionally very low compared to where they've been for a long time. So putting more money down doesn't help you as much as you'd think. And don't forget, you know, up to $750,000 of mortgage interest deductible as a primary residence. So that mortgage interest comes off, you know, a little bit in your tax return. Obviously, I'm not an accountant. Feel free to talk to a CPA. And then a hack for anyone who's making large purchases and has lots of money that isn't talked about too often, but I'll share on the personal side is that if you borrow money and you

use that money to invest in any anything, stock market bonds, whatever, that interest is deductible as investment interest expense. Again, not a CPA. Talk to your lawyer. I'll put a link in the show notes. But so I know people that have been able to, you know, buy a house in cash and then recoup, you know, do the mortgage a day later and then take that mortgage and invest it. So one thing we did to kind of do this strategy a little bit was we liquidated a lot of our personal investment savings, bought more of the house than we could, and then immediately financed more of it and put that money back in our investment account. And by doing that, we could go over the deductible mortgage interest limit because that extra mortgage interest was

actually being classified as investment interest because it was being used for the purpose of investing. So I'm not going to go down that rabbit hole. But, you know, I know people who have, you know, multi-million dollar mortgages that are 100% deductible. And you can deduct that interest against investment returns and investment gains, whether it's capital gains or interest income or anything like that. There's also a ton of awesome tax hacks when it comes to commercial property. I know you guys did an episode all about the way to do real estate and not pay taxes when you're doing it for investment properties. I don't remember the episode number, but we'll link to it in the show notes for sure because I know you guys have gone deep on that on the commercial side. But there is a hack here if you have cash on hand or even if your house

is appreciated and you have equity, you can refinance, take cash out of your house. And as long as you invest that cash out refinance money, that extra mortgage interest will also be usually, talk to your CPA classified as investment interest expense and be deductible. Yeah, you can write off the interest and you don't get taxed in the money that you took out. Yeah. I will say actually remember the episode off the top of my head. I have every single episode memorized. It was was 689, our Bigger's episode with Matt Bondrager, who is an awesome CPA. If you own a short-term rental, here's something worth knowing. Not all landlord policies are built for your type of property. And with holiday bookings, chilly weather, and higher

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last things that you need to be thinking about. You know, we made an offer. We, you know, we secured our loan as we're wrapping up the process of buying home. Is there anything else there? Is it really, it just kind of closes and that's all that happens? You know what? David, you actually, you gave a very good tip the other day about keeping your documents into one place. You think you could run us through that? Because when you said it, I was like, oh my God, it's so easy. Why doesn't everyone do this before they apply for a mortgage? So when you're getting ready to buy a house in the first place, a lot of people hate the pre-approval process. It's like pulling teeth. You have to go get your pay stubs. You have to get bank statements. You have to find your tax returns. Well, who knows where their tax returns are.

most of the time. And if you're not used to navigating your company's HR website to get pay stubs, it can take three hours to figure that thing out. It's very frustrating. So the advice that I give to all of our clients and what I do myself is I create a Google folder in Google Drive with that information. And I just, when I download those documents, I stick it in that folder. And that way, if you decide that you want to get pre-approved with several different lenders, if you can use the method like Chris was saying, where you're talking different people, you're sending the same stuff to Everybody, it's really easy. Then when I close on a house, I open another Google Drive folder for every address,

and I keep all the information for every house in that folder. It is incredibly simple when you do it. So we get our loan documents. I stick it in there. All the inspection reports. I stick it in there. The disclosures for the house, they're going to go in there. The mortgage note, every piece of information, the property management agreement,

if I'm going to manage the property, the work from the contractor, the scope of work and how much I paid them, whatever it is, it all goes in that same folder. and then if I ever need it, I know exactly where to go to get it. I love that. I did not do that in the first house. And you had to go back and track down the mortgage docs. And I was surprised that just because you sign a lot of these mortgage docs in person, I didn't get a copy without requesting them as an attachment in my email.

It was in some secure thing that wasn't easy to access. And then the last other thing I put in that folder. So now I have that folder. I would say put a Google sheet in that folder, Excel, I whatever. And every time you make any expenditures to improve the house, make sure you write it down because we just did a renovation and that kind of sparked this idea. But at the end of the tenure at a house, when you sell it, you take the amount that you made from the house selling it. You subtract the amount that you spent to buy it. And that's your kind of gain on the house.

But you can deduct all the improvements you made to that house. And so it might seem small at the beginning. Maybe you just redid some floors. But those things add up over the life of the house. And I think it's really helpful if just right as soon as you close, you have one place you can start to track every improvement and every expense you put to improve that house so that you can save on the taxes at the end. And if you ever want to sell that house, that's something you can show the next buyers of the property. Here's all the improvements that we made over the time we had the home and here's the receipts. Speaking of tracking all this stuff and storing documents, there's one thing after you buy this house that's very important is to make sure you get that at house insured.

And I just did a really deep dive on insurance. I went through every policy, talked to multiple brokers, multiple companies. I tracked a lot. I probably spent 50 hours on insurance. And I wanted to share a few things. Any thoughts from you guys quick on insurance or should I jump in? No, let's do it. But I do want to say I listen to it, dude.

I mean, it is clear you put 50 hours of research into it. And as the keeper of all the episodes, you can find that episode of all the hacks. That's number 104. So make sure to go listen to that after you listen to this. Make that be the first thing you listen to because I promise you will, answer all of your questions as it pertains to homeowners insurance. And more. I think that every time someone sends me an email on how much they saved after listening to that episode, I write it down. And the stack rank is currently at $14,000. So if you listen to that episode and you save more than $14,000,

absolutely reach out. I want to put you at the top of the leaderboard. The goal is to save people as much as possible. That's part of the theme of the show. But one of the things that I think is really important is when we bought this home, the amount that we could insure the home for was not what I thought was an appropriate amount. So there are multiple people that have a requirement. The lender is going to have some requirement that you insure the home enough. The insurance company will. But at the end of the day, that insurance is there to make sure that you can rebuild that home if something happens. And I asked around from some real estate agents I knew how much it would cost to buy a tear down and build a house. And I asked a builder. And the numbers

they gave me were about 20% more than the cost estimator that the insurance company gave me. And they were more than what our lender wanted us to have the home insured for. So for me, I didn't want to deal with that risk. So I actually just increased the coverage on the home. So my home is insured for more than the minimum that they required. And one way to increase that total number that's cheaper than just insuring it for more is looking for extended reconstruction as an add-on to your policy. So that will cover you for, you know, anywhere from 25 to 100% of the cost of your home. So if you have a home that's worth 500 grand and you insured for 500 grand, but you add 50% extended reconstruction,

up to 750 to repair it. If building materials go up or something, you know, changes in the time, you'll get a little bit of extra coverage there. So I think that's something really important to think about as you go through that. Yeah, that's really cool. I never thought about that. insurance, I'll just say this little line here because we don't have time to get into it. It's becoming increasingly difficult to get and significantly more expensive. I'm literally starting an insurance company right now because it has been so hard to find

this. And I didn't realize so I just bought a lot of real estate how bad it's getting in certain states. There are certain areas where you're looking at homes that you will literally not be able to get insurance if you plan on making it a short-term rental. Florida is notorious for this. I had a quote on a property I bought in Florida that was, $26,000 a year for an insurance policy. I mean, that is a mortgage payment on a normal home and some California problems as well. So in your due diligence process, we used to treat insurance

like just an afterthought. Like, oh, yeah, yeah, my loan officer will connect me with someone. I'll look at policies. I'll pick one. No, you got to make sure before you close on that house that you can get insurance and that it will be insured for as much as you will need if something goes wrong. Great point there, Chris. Yeah, absolutely. Tahoe is another area like that where I know people who have very, very high costs. And even in the Bay Area, because of the fires, there are a bunch of insurance carriers that just won't insure. Travelers told me, we can't insure your home. We're like, we're not even in a real wildfire area, but we're off their list. Yeah, there's a Burr project that we're working on that we're going to have,

we're going to do a show on in the future. We did one previously. I could not get insurance for fire. I had to go through the state. The state had to create its own insurance program because providers were not providing it to people and know you can't get a loan in most cases if you don't have fire insurance on a property. So people don't talk about it very often, but it's a pretty significant problem that's going around. I'm glad you brought it up. Yeah, I'll give a couple quick ones and then obviously check out this episode if you want to go deep and save money on insurance. Bundling, not always the best deal. So a lot of people think, I'm just going to get my home insurance with the same company that does my auto insurance.

We found that, you know, many carriers, that was not the case. And we probably looked at 15, 20 carriers. So don't just assume that that's the right thing. Also, don't just assume that that that's the right thing. Also, don't just assume that your carrier that you've had for five years because they have their like, you've been a customer forever discount is actually cheaper. I found that to definitely not be the case in our situation. Also, don't forget that now you own a home, there's a chance that that home has, you know, either now or in the future increased your net worth enough that it might be worth looking at an umbrella policy that goes beyond the value of the home or your homeowner's insurance.

And that will also extend to your auto insurance. So I think there are a lot of people out there that buy a home. It appreciates over time. Their net worth grows and grows and grows and they're driving around and they haven't updated their auto policy and they have $100,000 of liability insurance. So get in a car accident, you know, something happens terrible and someone sues you for more than that. Well, it turns out that you have more assets. And if you don't have an umbrella policy to sit on top of your auto policy or your home policy, you could find yourself in a not great situation. and there are some states where you're even able to sue someone for their future earnings. So you really want to make sure that as you kind of, we're talking about real estate, we're talking about building wealth.

As you cross that threshold to now I'm starting to build my wealth, I think it's equally as important to protect that wealth. And so that's something that it's very inexpensive. You know, we're talking, you know, $100, you know, depending on how much you need to protect yourself up to like a million dollars a year. I think it's something people should be considered. And then last, you buy this home, wait until you move in. You know, after you've moved in, go around the house with a camera or your phone and just take a video of everything in the room and just document all the stuff you own.

Because it's going to save you a ridiculous amount of time. If anything were to happen, burn down, burglary. You probably didn't save the receipts for everything you own. So take five minutes. Make your own like MTV crib style video running around, you know, sharing everything in your house just in case so you have that on hand. I think that's pretty important as well. I've had to go through that process before and I did not do that. You know, gosh, it was horrible.

It was horrible. And you got to show receipts and you got to show photos and you got to look through thousands of photos on your camera roll for like some random angle of your house. Yeah, try to find that like family picture you took with the flat screen in the background. Yeah, just walk through, make that video. I got a bunch of other tips, but we've been doing a lot in this episode. And I think anyone who's looking to buy a home is absolutely going to be able to get a better deal, find a better. home, find the right home, and get through that process easier. This has been so helpful. I'm so glad we got to do this episode. I feel like there's more things we could break down, but at this point,

I feel like this is a good stopping point. Is there any last bits of wisdom that you guys want to share to anyone thinking about going through this process? Yeah, there's a thing that I mentioned to a lot of people who say, I don't want to be a real estate investor or renting is cheaper than owning. It often is. In most cases, if you buy a home, the mortgage is going to be more than the rent in year one. But go back to what rents were five years ago, 10 years ago. Are you telling me that the mortgages from 10 years ago are more expensive than rents today? It's hardly ever the case. So when you take the longer term approach, even if you're not a real estate investor looking to rent out a property, buying a home and locking in a mortgage, especially with all the inflation we have, will always be cheaper for

you in the long run. If you look at what your parents are paying on the house that they bought 25 years ago, those payments are laughable. But at the time they bought it, they thought it was expensive. So I often tell people, even if they don't want to be a quote-unquote real estate investor, you should still buy a house and make sure that you've taken control of your financial future. You're not in the hands of landlords that can raise rent every year. My only caveat there would be given the fees that you pay to an agent when you're selling the house and to the buyer's agent as well, if you're going to buy a home and you're going to be there for a year or two, you might not make money if you plan on selling it in a year or two, given the fees that are associated with that

process. However, my advice, and this will lead us to an episode on both of our shows about house hacking is there are ways, if you think, gosh, I can only really afford a two-bedroom house, but we're about to start a family and we're going to need a bigger house in a few years. What do I do? There are ways to buy the four-bedroom house or the duplex that you might one day need for your whole family or something like that now. Use tactics that you guys have talked about, we've talked about in multiple episodes that we'll link in the show notes on house hacking to be able to get that house that two, three, four, five years from now is the house you want and get it earlier, increase some cash flow from it so you can afford it for those next three or

four years while it's more space than you need. And I think that ends up allowing you to buy your 10, 15, 20, 30 year home before you're ready for all that space and not be in a situation where you either can't buy the home or you've got to buy a home and sell it in a few years. So we've both done episodes on it. There's a number of tactics there. I think you can even use that income from your house hack to end up qualifying for income on your DTI for rent for your mortgage. So I think there's some really great stuff there. Obviously, we've both done episodes on it, but there's a lot of stuff there. We did that in San Francisco and that helped us buy a three-bedroom place when we really only needed a one-bedroom. Yeah, house hacking is, I'll always thank house

hacking for giving me my start. It is the catalyst for all wealth and real estate, my deep, deep belief. So yes, go listen to both those episodes. If you were closed off to the idea, I promise. After you listen to them, you're going to be all in. Awesome. This has been fantastic. I guess thank you for being here. Thank you for having me here. Thanks for doing this kind of fun episode. And I hope we get to have a conversation like this again soon. Yeah, Chris, for people in our audience that want to learn more about you, where can they find you? Yeah. I'm at all the hacks in the whatever podcast app you're listening to this on on the internet. You know, fortunately not too common of a term. So if you like optimizing real estate,

but you're interested in optimizing your life, your health, your money, your trade. You're I'm one of those crazy people with 10 million points and play the game hard. Travel the world for free. If any of that is something you want to do, come on over, have a listen, all the hacks. I'd love to have you there. I'd love to hear from you. Reach out to me anywhere. I just love having new people in the community.

What about you guys? Rob, for anyone who's been charmed and bedazzled by your amazing personality, where can they find more? You can find me over at Rob Built on YouTube, Rob Built on Instagram, and on the Apple Podcast review platform where you'll be leaving us a five-star review. if you like what we do and if you want our content to be served up to millions of other people who get the benefit of learning about financial freedom. What about you, David? If I'm at David Green24.com, see everything I got going on or your favorite social media or YouTube platform, David Green 24E at the end of green. And you guys forgot the most important thing,

which is if you're listening to this on all the hacks, go check out the Bigger Pockets Real Estate podcast. Well, that goes without saying. Of course. I just, you know, got to remind everybody. Yeah, we've got almost 800 episodes of content just like this if you want to learn how to make money through real estate. And Chris, I will say I have a book coming out through Bigger Pockets Publishing in October that's going to be called Pillars of Wealth. And it's all about saving money, making money, and investing the difference. And so much of what you've talked about, I echo the sentiments in that book that is incredibly important to be a wise steward of your resources. If there's ways you can save money through credit hard hacking, travel hacking, food hacking, everything. Take advantage of that.

The people who manage their money well tend to be rewarded by the money gods who bring more. So I love what you're doing. Thank you for doing it. I'm glad our audience got to hear about it. Yeah, I'm glad I'm here. And I like what you're talking about because building wealth is not always about sacrificing everything. And so I think what my goal is to help people live a life they really want to live, just live it for less. Yeah, that's awesome.

Exactly. Yeah. And on that note, there's an episode, I think everyone listening on the bigger pocket side should check out. I did this episode with Bill Perkins who wrote a book called Die Was Zero. And it's radically reframed my perspective on basically all things, wealth, spending money and everything. I really wanted to focus on what's important, maximizing my net fulfillment, not necessarily my net worth. And so if I leave people with, obviously, if you want to optimize your insurance and save money,

go there. If you want to travel for free, whereas episodes there. But if you want to just kind of like really kick your entire perspective on money, you know, around and think about whether there's maybe a new way you might want to be thinking about how you spend and save. episode 91 with Bill Perkins literally changed my life. It's the only episode I've done

where I think I've listened to it five or six times. Nice. Okay. Yeah, I'm going to go listen to that since I need something to listen to after episode 104. Insurance, baby.

All right. Well, it's been great having you here, Chris. This is David Green for Rob, my partner in crime, I'm a solo. Signing off. All right, and as you see, we broke this interview

into three parts, but Chris kept them all together and released them as one longer podcast on his. So go check out to All the Hacks podcast feed wherever you get your podcast. Thank you all for listening to the Bigger Pockets Real Estate podcast. Make sure you get all our new episodes by subscribing on YouTube, Apple, Spotify, or any other

podcast platform. Our new episodes come out Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. I'm the host and executive producer of the show, Dave Meyer. The show is produced by Ian K. Copywriting is by Calicoe Content. And editing is by Exodus Media. If you'd like to learn more about real estate investing or to sign up for our free newsletter, please visit www.biggerpockets.com.

The content of this podcast is for informational purposes only. All host and participant opinions are their own. Investment in any asset, real estate included, involves risk. So use your best judgment and consult with qualified advisors before investing. You should only risk capital you can afford to lose. And remember, past performance is not indicative of future results. BiggerPockets LLC disclaims all liability for direct, indirect, consequential, or other damages arising from a reliance on information presented in this podcast.