TLDR:
- I am working on closing on a property to start my journey in house-hacking and real estate investing.
- I need to migrate my software to a new platform since the one I am using is deprecating the platform version my apps were running on and it sucks :/
These are hectic times. It feels weird trying to stay productive and hustle while the world is going through a pandemic and what feels like chaos. It is times like these that make me wish that I would already have a stable base of income that’s not solely reliant on my employer. If I lose my job now, I am lucky enough to have an emergency fund to support me, but that would shake my reality. I heard this quote that feels more relevant now than when I first read it: “Side-hustles and Entrepreneurship is this generation’s job security.”
REAL ESTATE INVESTMENTS
I’ve locked in a price to purchase my first “house-hacking” property for $50,000. It’s single family home with an unfinished basement. My plan still is to renovate the basement to serve as another unit that I can rent out and live in the upper unit. I’ve locked in a rate of 2.75% this morning for an FHA 30 year primary mortgage loan which I am pretty psyched about. Lucky enough I was able to lock this in since the state of Nebraska does not have a “Shelter in Place” order. I am waiting to close on the property before I start celebrating.
The upfront cost to owning the home would be around $7,000. And the monthly payments is set to be around $400 a month with principal, interest, taxes, and PMI included. Not bad, this exceed the 1% rule which suggests that the estimated rent of a property should be at least 1% of the purchase price. Since I purchased the house for $50,000, 1% of 50,000 is $500. Which means once I move out and rent both units, I can recieve between $500-$1000 on rent alone and have $100-$600 to split between expenses and profits.
I still need to work out the number for the estimated costs for renovating the property. And set some deadlines. Will need to set time aside and work on.
SOFTWARE
I was building my software on top of a platform called “Zeit Now” which uses Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, and other cloud infrastructures to deploy your application in an easy and smooth Dev experience. Unfortunately, they are deprecating version 1 of the platform where I had the most of my applications built on. I loathe them for this. I wish there was more transparency on whether to continue building on this platform or not.
I am now working to migrate my apps over to Heroku. They seem reliable and have kept good to keeping their platform the same without breaking changes. I tried deploying the other day but of course I’m running into some issues. Need some time to look into.
I also moved from using Nuxt JS for the “Admin Panel” of my app to just using a plain Vue SPA build. I kept running into issues with Nuxt like some packages not supporting SSR and some weird build issues, that I decided it wasn’t worth the hassle for an app that isn’t going to be crawled by search engines.
COURSES
This is an area I want to focus my attention towards but with trying to work out closing costs for the property, moving my apps to a different platform and just life in general, I’ve delayed putting attention here. Once those two issue are starting to get wrapped up I will shift back to putting time here.
FINAL THOUGHTS
Even though these are crazy times, don’t feel guilty about working on yourself and your future. We owe a big debt of gratitude for those people who are on the frontlines of all this and be sure to reach out and share your thoughts and donations of appreciation. I know I need to. But continue working on building multiple streams of income so that in these trying times you can survive and thrive.