Do you ever wonder what it would take to grow your net worth to one million dollars? How about in the New York City Metro area? What are the steps you would have to take? How aggressively should you be saving? What should you be investing in? Today we’re speaking with a long time listener whose story is going to show you exactly how he did just that.
Mindy: Hello, hello, hello. My name is Mindy Jensen and with me as always is my very own million dollar co-host, Scott Trench.
Scott: Awesome. Well great to be here with my real estate co-host Mindy Jensen. As always, we’re here to make financial independence less scary, less just for somebody else, to introduce you to every money story because we truly believe financial freedom is attainable for everyone, no matter where or when you’re starting or what industry you work in.
Scott: Today we’re going to talk to Eric, who posted in our Facebook group that he hit a big financial milestone in late 2023, I think it was December 2023, after just six years of getting serious about financial independence, um and discovering kind of the FIRE world and concepts there. You can listen to a story about how if you start taking these meaningful steps, maybe getting your PhD in personal finance as he referred to it, you can also achieve a really significant outcome uh potentially in five, 10 years or maybe even a little less.
Mindy: Eric, welcome to the Bigger Pockets Money Podcast. I am so excited to talk to you today.
Eric: Yeah, I’m super excited to be here too. This is uh surreal a little bit.
Mindy: Let’s go back to December 2023, just a few months ago. You hit the 1 million dollar mark in your net worth, uh after about six years on your journey, which is awesome. Let’s all celebrate this. Hooray, yay. Uh what did life look like six or seven years ago?
Eric: One of the pivotal moments I think for me was, I work in advertising, so I’m a creative director and I had never really thought about money before. I had, you know, saved a little bit. I had, uh, you know, had enough money for down payments for houses in the in the past, but um one of the most pivotal moments for me was I had a coworker who was by far the oldest person that I’d ever seen in advertising, period, over the age of 50. And one day he was just quietly gone. Um there was no retirement party, there was no announcement, just gone.
Eric: And when I look at my industry, I realized that no one ever really makes it to 50 and that 40 is when that target sort of appears on your back. You know, you’re you’re old, you’re not cool, you’re expensive. You’re constantly trying to sell things to the new generation of consumers and you’re the, you know, the easiest cost cutting. So that was the first realization that I needed to do something. And then the second thing was I had moved from one of my houses to a little further commute and I had a long drive now. And I I drove through this part of the state that had only one radio station. So around 6 p.m. every night, you know, you can imagine on a conservative radio station what’s on on the radio. It was Dave Ramsey of course.
Eric: And so I started listening every day and you know, for all his faults, I feel like a lot of that information was the, you know, the baseline and what really changed my life and got me into looking for, you know, other things and how could I improve my finances.
Scott: Awesome. And I’d love to just kind of keep diving into the the this, this part of the journey here. So, you know, leading up to this moment where you realized, oh shoot, like this is not going to be a 30 year career in advertising sales here. And this person’s exit really, you know, struck a chord. What was your overall situation like? You said you had…
Mindy: What year was this that you purchased this house?
Eric: This was 2013. So it, the asking price for this house was 265. Um again, I was a young kid, I was single, I didn’t have a lot of money. Um it was across from the cemetery. It was on a busy street. Uh the house was in pretty good shape, uh but the owner who sadly passed away, luckily had taken out a home equity loan and he fixed all the big stuff. So the siding, the windows, the furnace, the driveway. But inside it was super, super dated.
Scott: And where is this in proximity to New York City?
Eric: This is about an hour outside of New York.
Scott: In Connecticut.
Eric: Yep, right on a train line, um easy access to the city. Um so even back then, you know, you could get houses for 265. I don’t know about that anymore, but um, this was also 2013 and I think you guys probably remember this, there were still a lot of foreclosures.
Eric: So this house was dated but it was, you know, it was nice in terms of all the mechanicals. And I knew right away when I saw this thing, I was like, I gotta buy it because I had seen so much rough stuff uh that I had no money or or no business trying to take on as somebody, you know, as young as I was, and I didn’t know anything about renovation whatsoever. And I think that, um what I learned from this house too, is kind of like, uh, a term I’ve coined is “in its Grandpa’s house.” Like this was Grandpa’s house. Grandpa, you know, owned this house, took care of it. He knew what to do. You know, I think that generation was really good at, you know, taking pride in their where they lived, but it was dated. And it was something that I could move into, I could fix it slowly. And um yeah, I bought it. And over the next four years, I you know, my wife at the time was my girlfriend and even friends, we slowly transformed that house. Um we took a wall down, you know, we re-did the kitchen, um, did the bathroom upstairs. Yeah, I learned so much. Like that house actually was the best teacher I’ve ever had.
Mindy: So you said it was on a busy street across the street from the cemetery and that’s not going to change no matter how much you change the interior. Do you still own this house?
Eric: I don’t, and I can get to what I did with that later because that’s what got me into basically being a landlord is that house.
Scott: Well, well, let me let me ask a couple of quick questions here. So in in 2013 when you purchased this house, you know, you said you put 2.5% down, did you have any other meaningful financial assets at this point? Can you give us a snapshot of your financial picture? And then maybe in two, you said four years, what was your, you know, can you give us an an idea of your financial snapshot around 2017 whenever the next um event with this house happens?
Eric: Yeah, sure. I think that that house to just to get to the 2.5% was all the money I had. You know, I don’t I don’t even think I had much more. I might have had a small 401K that was basically just the match from a prior company that I had never even looked at. And I had probably still at that time $26,000 in student loans. Um I had a car note, which was probably 20 grand. So I was definitely negative net worth at this point. Um and the only money I had was was put down on that house. So, uh that was kind of the start.
Scott: Awesome. And and one of the things that I think New York City offers, like the challenge is housing, all these things, like you’re having to lever up to your eyeballs just to get a house an hour away from the city with it. But New York City also offers incredible career growth and opportunities. And so there’s an investment there. Was that happening for you in in your industry at this point in time as well?
Eric: It was, and that’s actually what kept me in that area is I had a lot more, you know, options, flexibility. I wasn’t super concerned about if I lost my job. And I I actually only in the time that I lived in Connecticut, I only had two jobs. So I only I only jumped once. And the second job was really sort of the big agency experience, the the fun clients and all of that. So it was definitely advantageous to be that close.
Scott: Awesome. And can you give us a picture of of your income like kind of relative to New York’s New York’s standards during this time?
Eric: Yeah, 2013, I was still sort of a, you know, a young buck at that time. I think I probably made $80,000 a year. I think that was probably the salary that, and I was barely able to qualify for that 265. So that was just me by myself. That was probably what it was in 2013. So that that’s a, I don’t know how much that’s changed, but clearly that was a kind of a starting point for me.
Mindy: And is this when you started listening to Dave Ramsey?
Eric: No, that so that Dave Ramsey wasn’t for a while yet. It was probably another four years uh before I I heard about Dave Ramsey. So you could think of 2013 to 2017 as just like drift, you know, I didn’t know what I was doing. You know, I was just kind of, you know, moving through the stages of life. I didn’t really have a plan. Um, and that that house kind of was the start of it. It kind of got me to budget for projects and buying tools and other other things like that. So I really do owe a lot to that house.
Now that Eric has painted us a picture of what his financial situation looked like before he discovered FIRE, after this quick ad break, we’ll hear about the steps he took to get out of debt and propel himself towards financial freedom.
Welcome back to the Bigger Pockets Money Podcast.
Mindy: Okay, so in 2017 you start driving and you are listening to Dave Ramsey. What was your kind of aha moment where you like did you take stock of where your net worth was or, I mean, other than the the co-worker that was just suddenly gone one day with no notice.
Eric: Yeah, so we moved once after that first house. And what happened was is we were about to have our first child and we got trigger happy like, “Wait a second, we don’t want to be here. We got to buy another house,” right? Again, another sort of decision without any forethought. We moved a little further north, but to qualify for that mortgage, I had to get a renter in my first house.
Eric: So that is why I essentially became a reluctant landlord. And I joke because you can go back in my Bigger Pockets history because I started an account probably right around then, 2017, 2018. Um, and I people roasted me, like roasted me. “You’re not accounting for CapEx, maintenance, you’re not, that’s not cash flow.” I assumed cash flow was basically, you know, mortgage, uh, minus or rent minus mortgage and that’s obviously not the case. So that kind of got me started into learning about real estate, but I still wasn’t really, you know, learning that much about, you know, other personal finance.
Eric: So now this is like around 2018, let’s just say it’s the beginning of that year. That rental was making okay money. I think it was 1600 bucks, my rent or, uh, the mortgage was 1600 or the rent was 2400. Now I’m about to have a second child. And of course we want maybe another bigger house that’s quote closer to my wife’s job. She did get a new job. I want to say I had, I had some equity in the house houses that I had, the two that I was one that I was about to sell and then the first one, but I still had $24,000 in student loans, which blows my mind. I had a car note again at a new car. Um and now I was about to have higher expenses with a family of four.
Eric: This is when I started to get, I think like a lot of people feel this way, old Dave just wasn’t doing it anymore. I didn’t have any new advice. It’s almost like you get to the baby, the last baby step, which is invest in and grow rich and it’s like, “Well, what is that?” So this is where I did, you know, I’m bored at home one night and I’m like, “best money podcast.” And of course the first two results are a show that just started, Bigger Pockets Money. And then the other one was Mad Fientist. And so the first two episodes I ever listened to of a of a personal podcast or personal finance podcast that wasn’t Dave Ramsey, the guests were Mr. Money Mustache and J L Collins.
Eric: So this is where like the fuse was lit, you know, all those years leading up to that where I kind of did stuff right. I got lucky a lot of times, right? Like buying that house was luck. I had no idea what I was doing. I was lucky that, you know, I didn’t lose any money with the tenant there. That’s kind of where it just went into turbo charge. It was, uh, reading, it was listening. I listened to you guys and then I Choose FI, all that stuff. It was just daily. And I slowly just picked up things and and started going with with information that I learned.
Scott: So I I want to observe something here because, you know, I I I think Dave Ramsey has done a lot of good for a lot of people out there in terms of helping their financial positions. But the the carrot of, “Hey, you can become a millionaire in probably less than a decade with a little bit of luck and some hustle and a couple of swings in addition to, you know, um, the formula of saving and investing here,” um, really I think is something that Mr. Money Mustache and, and I’ll credit Bigger Pockets before I ever joined as an employee, kind of got into my head and I think it just totally changes the motivation in the game to a certain degree.
Scott: And I wish that was like, I wish that was presented to people who are in debt upfront where it’s like, “Yeah, you’re gonna have to slog through this for like two years to chunk out your debt. But, like if you do that, then you have like another six or seven and you’re going to be really cranking it out with a couple hundred thousand dollars in net worth and the snowball is gonna begin churning here.” And it sounds like that’s what got, that’s what got you going there. Do you think that if that had been presented to you in that fashion, seven year, five, six, seven years earlier, that your trajectory would have changed? That that would have been highly motivating?
Eric: 100% because Dave Ramsey, I didn’t mention this, like the reason why that was a pivotal thing is from the moment I started listening to those um episodes, that was when, I want to say this was 2018, I did everything I could to be a popper essentially that year to pay off all the debt. I sold my car.
Scott: Did you swap your Bentley for a Corolla?
Eric: It was a, it was a souped up Volkswagen Golf. So that’s what it, you know, it was still a $35,000 car. Um, I sold that, I took the equity and what the little cash I did have and I paid off my student loans. So that year that was the whole job, was the student loans were gone, the car was gone. So from 2018, I kind of started fresh from a, you know, consumer debt perspective. I did cut up all the credit cards, right? I never used them until I learned about travel rewards, but um yes, as soon as I would have known a little bit earlier that, you know, that that next phase was there, I think it would have happened a lot faster. It took me a couple of years to figure that out.
Scott: Those moves are the life changers, right? Here like that’s why I want to drill into it because, you know, the housing is another one that’s like huge and I do want to get into that and hear what you did there if anything. But that’s sometimes really hard because then you got to uplift your family and like actually change where you live. The car is something that like almost anybody could change overnight and do and have a several hundred thousand dollar outcome in 5, 6, 7 years alongside, I’m sure there’s other lifestyle changes that we’ll get into here. But I just love it like that’s the like if you’re trying to change your trajectory and you’re not willing to do what Eric did and sell the fancy car and use that cash to chunk, begin the snowball effect, like you’re just gonna be treading water for a lot longer. Like it’s going to it would have extended your journey by probably three, four years potentially. So 2018, you sell the car, you’re starting to make these moves. What else, what else happens? How do we what where does the journey take us from here?
Eric: Yeah, so the housing, the the real estate side of it, I kept that house and in 2020, that’s sort of like COVID just hits and this is where again something I learned from the podcast, the two out of the five year rule, right? Cap gains exclusion. I had bought that in 2013 and I had, I’d lived there for two years, three, four years, whatever it was, but it was still counted for two. And then 2020 was my last year to be able to sell it.
Eric: And so my first house that I had rented all that time, I decided to sell it. So I paid 265 but at that time the mortgage was down to 220, sold it for 380. So after realtor fees, I probably netted 130, 140. This is like well into financial independence, you know, PhD where I’m like, I’m not going to touch that money. I’m going to take all of that and put it and go shopping for my next rental. So I never took a penny from that one.
Eric: The second house that I bought, we did the same thing. I Mindy talks about doing live-in flips. Like that’s what we were doing. We’d fix each house, do what we could ourselves. Uh and then when we’d sell it, it would be a little bit more than probably what it was worth if if we hadn’t done anything. The second one, the numbers are okay, but we had enough equity in the second house that I didn’t use all of it for the next house. We put 20% down and then I kept some of it.
Eric: So those two things combined plus in that time we did 401K match or uh maxed out, 403Bs, we opened Roths, we did HSAs. Like I got continual raises and promotions and now we had this spread that we weren’t spending and we were putting towards all those things. Um and yeah, it it that’s kind of 2020s where things went crazy. Obviously the stock market did too um after that, but I think for us personally, that’s where things really started to take off.
Mindy: Do you have a FI number? Have you gone through the 4% rule and created a a number that you will get to to make yourself feel financially independent?
Eric: I don’t anymore, and I think partly because of inflation, like I’ve just I’ve given up. You know, you look at what your spending is now and you’re like, “Okay, I think I needed another year of uh tracking spending to figure out a more realistic number.” But I did at one point. Obviously, I think a lot of people that especially live in the Northeast, a million dollars isn’t going to cut it, right? Like $40,000 a year at 4% is not all that much money, but I think, you know, 2 million-ish, like now you’re getting into a a more comfortable spending level where if you had a little bit of extra coming in from rentals or you’re able to do something part-time, I think that that would be totally doable. Um so I I would say that that’s probably more in the ballpark for at least for today. But I again, I’m, who knows what the future holds, but that would probably be a a target next.
Mindy: Okay. And with your $1 million net worth, what comprises that number?
Eric: I would say 60% of that is equity in real estate. Primary residence and then I I do have a larger rental which I can talk about that was a home run. It was a a lucky home run, but um that accounts for about 60% of it. The rest of it, I think 10% of it is cash. Um that’s kind of like my cash number is 10% net worth is my cash and then the rest of it is in equities and all the different accounts.
All right, we’ll be right back after the break.
Welcome back to the show everyone.
Scott: Awesome. So so just to pick up the story here, 2018 comes around, you get really um into it, you get your PhD in personal finance as you referred to it here. Um you the snowball begins to to uh begin churning here and uh we’ve skipped over a couple of things there. There’s this real estate deal and there’s a move um that happens um to even farther northeast um away from New York City. Can you tell us about those and any other big milestones to the on the journey to this million dollar number?
Eric: Yeah, so this was the fun one. Um so this is right coming up into 2020 again and a lot of people had nothing to do, right? We’re sitting at home. I had decided to sell that house. Um so I took all the equity from that and I started shopping and in my new town…
Scott: What what was that gain like for the sec… oh oh that was the $130,000-ish gain that we just talked about.
Eric: So I moved to, you know, like this bucolic town in Connecticut has the the picture postcard main street, all the grand Victorian houses on it. And what’s interesting about this place is there’s never any rentals ever. And it’s within commuting distance of New York City and one house popped up on the market and it it was a big 1899, 3,300 square foot um Victorian house. And it was a, it was a mess.
Eric: It was zoned office, first of all, which I thought was weird. Why is it on the MLS but it’s zoned office? And then I just kicking the tires, I had no agent. I I called the the listing agent being like, “Has anyone come to see this thing? I live two minutes down the road. Can you show it to me for 15 minutes? I just do want to do a walk through.” She’s like, “Sure, you’re really the only person that’s even come to see it.” So I went to go look at it and yeah, it was like four offices all cut up on the first floor. The second floor was an apartment though. Like it was definitely an apartment.
Eric: So I went to the town and I I said, “Can you pull the records on this thing? I know you have really strict zoning in this town. What is technically this thing zoned as?” And I said, “Could this be used as a duplex or a triplex?” And the town got back to me after days with a report saying, “Yes, it was never actually technically re-zoned to office. It is since 1964 in our records a duplex.” So it was like, okay, awesome. That’s first step.
Eric: Second step was, “Oh, by the way, it’s actually an estate sale and it’s in probate still.” Okay, so there’s like a bunch of waiting around for a lot of information on this thing. So because of all this hassle, it was um, it ended up being the last piece of an old estate, right? That was like all that had been sold off and this was the last, you know, annoying piece that they wanted to get rid of. And once I found all this out, I was like, “I’m just going to lowball them.” I said they they wanted 400,000 for this house. I offered 300,000. Um, since it was in probate, I kind of threw a stink about that because I’m like, “I don’t even know if you can actually technically sell this thing.” So they counted at 315. And I was like, “I’ll take it. Yeah, I’m gonna take this for sure.” Because I had I had projected at that time if that were renovated, it was worth 600 at least, 550, 600. But I didn’t know at that time, I didn’t know any, I had a guess about what it could cost to renovate it.
Eric: But here’s, here’s a BP plug, right? So as soon as they accepted that offer, um, I had an inspection done. And I used that inspection and and I had remembered back in my sort of early days of real estate reading, I read J. Scott’s book, The Book on Flipping Houses, and he had a spreadsheet, downloadable spreadsheet in there to build a scope of work. So I downloaded that and I took the inspection line for line and made a scope of work out of that. And then I added all the things that I wanted to do to the house, like where are the bathrooms going to go, where the kitchens are going to go. Unfortunately, I I I’d used like, you know, vector, uh, graphics programs, I could do like a floor plan. So I I designed a floor plan over an old drawing and I put where I wanted the kitchens and bathrooms were and then I put that in the scope. And this thing ended up being 19 pages long.
Eric: It was 19 pages and every contractor that I met to go over what the bids were going to be would laugh at me. They’re like, “We’re not going to give you a scope on this. There’s no, no one’s ever even done this before.” And the one who did it, I was super lucky because he actually made the contract exactly like the the original scope. So I I knew exactly, you know, from this item to this item, I knew what what cost it was gonna be. And that made that process really good when we went to renovate it.
Eric: So to finance this thing, I ended up using hard money. Um my my friend was a partner, he was 50% of the money, but I got 60% of the equity because I did basically all the work. He was happy with that. And everything was good. Like we had the contractor lined up. Uh we were about to close on this thing. And here’s the trick that I learned or the the rub that I learned about a a town like this where there are no rentals. So the hard money lender backed out the week of closing because they were using comps from far away and the final underwriter said, “No, we don’t have enough comps here. We don’t know what the rents are going to be. This deal could be bad. He’s not gonna make any money.” And so they just walked away.
Eric: And so here I’m stuck with a closing date. Um I had to delay that. I had to scramble to find another hard money lender. And I got so lucky because my attorney who was working with me on the closing said, “I have a relative. They’re a bunch of old New York accountants that do hard money on the side. You know, it’s like a a small private fund. All you got to do is like old school go meet them, you know, walk through your finances, you know, shake your hand and and, you know, be true to your word and they’ll probably give you the money.” And they did.
Eric: So I I delayed closing by a couple of weeks. I I I I uh closed on the house, but what they did require is they did in escrow the first six months of interest payments upfront. So I had to come up with more than 20% because I put all the the six months of interest upfront. So then the draws were easy. They just took the money out every month. I didn’t have to pay them. And then the construction was fairly straightforward. I don’t think I ran into any major problems. I did had to, you know, scope of work trading where you take one thing that you wanted and say, “Oh, but you got to spend more on this” a couple of times, but it wasn’t bad.
Eric: So yeah, we got it renovated. I think at the end of it, we were, it was it ended up being about 200,000 to, uh, to do it. So we’re in it three or 515. Um and then I rented it in three weeks. I had renters in three weeks. Um and the gross rent was six, just shy of $6,000 at that time. So this is 2021.
Scott: And how long did the renovation take?
Eric: Started in January, was done in July.
Scott: You had renters in there by August?
Eric: Yes, yes. I actually had one renter in before it was even done because the real estate agent who sold me the house had knew a friend who was also an agent who sold their house, you know, their kids moved away and they wanted to downsize and she knew what I was doing to the house and she said, “Oh, go check out Eric’s house.” And so she walked through it while it was still tore up and she’s like, “I’ll take it.”
Scott: And this is a BRRRR, right? This ends up is that right?
Eric: So it it was supposed to be. This is where it gets fun again. You know, this is the town coming back again. Like this this town where there are no rentals. So I go to refinance it and right before closing again, they couldn’t find enough comps. So the money that I wanted to pay back the hard money lender plus have a little bit extra, they basically gave me just barely enough to pay back the hard money lender. So I walked away with, you know, zero extra money from the BRRRR. But the silver lining was the mortgage is only $320,000. I think it’s worth probably 750 now. So that’s where if you think about the equity spread in part of my net worth, like a lot of it’s in there.
Mindy: Okay, so I have a bunch of comments about this because I’m hearing things that maybe somebody who is a little newer to real estate might not hear or, you know, might not be able to read between the lines. You were the only person to go see this house on the MLS. The only people that can enter information into the MLS are real estate agents. And I am a real estate agent. I have seen so many mistakes on the MLS from fat fingers, from lazy entries. This was zoned office. If I’m looking for a house, that’s not even going to show up on my search. So you’re in there seeing these properties that other people aren’t seeing right there. Number one, great tip. Uh the second floor was an apartment. You actually walked through. If I know it’s zoned office, oh, it’s all offices, I’m going to write it off. You took the time to go in and dive into it. You said, “I know the town is really strict and I know there’s not a lot of rentals, but it’s still a desirable neighborhood.” You said it was built in 1899 and you didn’t have any problems with construction and that is a unicorn my friend. If your house is built in 1899…
Mindy: This is not a lipstick on a pig flip. This is a hardcore renovation. You made a 19-page scope of work. There’s a lot of contractors that are going to look at that like you found out and be like, “Oh, this is ridiculous.” You found one that didn’t say that. Keep talking to contractors. Don’t just interview three and pick like the cheapest of those three. Pick somebody who can actually do the work that you need done. Make a realistic scope of work, make a realistic budget. You couldn’t do that for $20,000. And I see people buying houses and they’re like, “Oh, I’ll just put 20 into it.” Well, you can just put 20 into it if that’s all it needs. But if it needs $400,000 worth of work, 20 isn’t even worth putting into it.
Scott: And this is a super inefficient market that you found here, right? This is the only, that’s that’s the whole all the problems you had with this deal are because there’s no comps for it. That’s also where the biggest spreads are and opportunities are. And your specific skill set, proximity to it and opportunism made it made this deal achievable for you and almost nobody else, right? And so that this is just this is this is wonderful. And opportunity comes knocking when you have some cash and a long history of earning more than you spend and a progression along this this continuum. You wouldn’t have been able to see this opportunity 10 years ago, right? This was because of the the the trajectory you put yourself on three, four years before uh that this lucky chance was was available for you to seize.
Eric: Yeah, it was definitely and what’s interesting is I remember this. I wasn’t scared because of the of that little first house I had, right? Like I, I I sort of took my lumps from people saying, “You don’t know what you’re doing,” and I just went and learned as much as I could to the extent that I felt comfortable doing this. But I also kind of, I I learned to enjoy construction, if that sounds weird, because of what I used to do myself, I started getting into, you know, “How do, like I’d friends who are in construction. Like how do you guys actually work? How does your business work?” Um what are the sort of tips to find your the best contractors, but also like I knew what I was talking about when I said, “I need this instead of that,” right?
Eric: So that helped a lot too, is just basic knowledge of construction. um so that I wasn’t getting ripped off with the reno. But I I did get lucky. I know that a lot of people today are struggling with finding good contractors and even finding any at all. So this was luck because it was 2020 where everything was slowed down. And I remember my cont, my GC came back towards the end, he goes, “Eric, if I were to bid this job today, it would be like 260. There’s no way I could do this job today for how much I quoted you back last year because of everything.” So it was luck, uh a lot of it.
Mindy: Luck is when preparation meets opportunity. You would not have been able to take advantage of it like Scott said if you didn’t have the money to put in there in the first place, but also would you have had the confidence to tackle it if you hadn’t taken on that house? And I am right there with you. I have a lot of construction experience because I used to have a lot more time. And now I’m trying to find contractors to do the work and it’s like you said, it’s very difficult. But YouTube a
