The New (Better) House Hack: No Roommates, More Rent

House hacking is still the easiest way to start investing in real estate—and it’s getting even easier. You no longer need to live with roommates, share spaces with tenants, and give up your home to offset your mortgage. Instead, thanks to some new methods, you may not even need to live with or next to a tenant at all. These “house hacking” methods still make you rich, still save you tons of money, and work in 2025. In fact, they’re so good, Dave and Henry are doing them right now, even in their 30s and 40s, even with spouses and kids! So what is house hacking? House hacking is when you rent out a portion of the space in or on your property to offset your mortgage cost. This could be renting out one unit in a duplex while you live in the other, or renting out a bedroom in a single-family home. While those are the more “traditional” ways to house hack, there are new tactics that still make you money every month without giving up your personal space. We’re talking about renting out garages, extra land, swimming pools, and more. Plus, new house hacking loans allow you to put even less money down on your next property so that you can get in with little money down, have other people pay most of your mortgage, and use the savings to build your passive income streams faster. It’s made us wealthy, and thousands of other investors, too. So, when are you going to start house hacking? In This Episode We Cover Why house hacking is the easiest way to get started in real estate in 2025 How to house hack without having roommates (multiple methods) New 5% down loans you can use for single-family AND multifamily rentals Alternatives to renting rooms/units (renting swimming pools, garage space, office space, land, etc.) Why Fall 2025 may be an even easier time to get your first house hack (buyers in control!) Henry’s new home that he’s personally designed for house hacking (you’ll want to live there) And So Much More! Check out more resources from this show on ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠BiggerPockets.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ and ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.biggerpockets.com/blog/real-estate-1182 Interested in learning more about today’s sponsors or becoming a BiggerPockets partner yourself? Email ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠[email protected]⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Dave Meyer?

  Is the traditional house hacking strategy finally dead? In the past, it was one of the most proven ways to build wealth, but interest rates and home prices are much higher now. Living for free isn't nearly as easy as it was pre pandemic. And in fact, for most house hackers, it's incredibly difficult to find. So can we declare house hacking dead? No, but the old way, it needs a refresh. And this is the new, better way to house hack in 2025. It still makes you wealthy. It still works with low money down, but only if you make these updates for the 2025 housing market. Today, we're going to show you how.

• 0:43Dave Meyer?

  Hey, everyone. I'm Dave Meyer, rental property investor and the head of real estate investing here at BiggerPockets. And with me today on the podcast is my friend, Henry Washington. What's up, man? How are you?

• 0:54Henry Washington?

  Hey, what's up, buddy? I'm doing great.

• 0:56Dave Meyer?

  We're talking about something you've never talked about before. It's the first time we've ever talked about house hacking.

• 1:02Henry Washington?

  What is this house hacking you speak of?

• 1:05Dave Meyer?

  Oh, well, I'm so glad you asked. For our audience, if you actually haven't heard of house hacking, so when you buy a multifamily property, live in one unit and rent out the others to help cover your living expenses, help generate cash, scale your portfolio. You can also do it with the rent by the room strategy, where you buy a single family home, live in one bedroom and rent out the others. Both really work. And listen, I'm like joking around with Henry, but we get it. You've heard about house hacking on the show. But you know what? When it stops making you rich and it stops being one of the best strategies to pursue, then we'll stop talking about it. But that hasn't happened yet, so we are going to keep talking about it.

• 1:46Henry Washington?

  It's just a really good way to get into this business. I really just define it as you monetizing your primary residence. Cause it can be a single, it can be a multi, but there's a lot of ways that you can generate income from your primary residence, no matter what kind of primary residence it is.

• 2:05Dave Meyer?

  I couldn't agree more. And I know there are hordes of people who say that your primary home is Is not an investment. I think it is completely a choice and that is what we're going to be talking about here today. And this format that we're going into is something we've been testing out over the last couple of weeks where Henry and I are talking about updates to new strategies. And if you're watching this on YouTube, listening on Spotify, leave us a comment. Let us know if you like this format, if you want to see more of these kinds of shows. Give us ideas for shows. We would love to hear your opinions on that. But today we're going deep into house hacking. So Henry, let me just ask you this. Why do you think some people are saying right now that house hacking

• 2:46Dave Meyer?

  doesn't work as well as it did in the past, or maybe they're as dramatic as saying that it is dead?

• 2:52Henry Washington?

  Yeah, I think that's just been like what people are doing with strategies that were really quote unquote, easy to do a couple of years ago is just saying that they're dead now because it's harder. And I wouldn't even necessarily go as far as to say that house hacking is harder. It's just different. A lot of things have happened over the past couple of years that actually make it more accessible than it was before. As the common investor is now more savvy to what this is, lenders have started to pick up on what this is.

• 3:22Dave Meyer?

  That's true.

• 3:23Henry Washington?

  There's been changes with lending that allow for this to be easier and less expensive for primary home buyers. Some of the red tape isn't as bad as it was before with some of the loan products. And so I, I wouldn't necessarily say it's harder to house hack. I think what people are saying in general about the real estate market is that it's harder to find properties where the numbers make sense at first glance.

• 3:46Dave Meyer?

  All right. So for those of our audience who's maybe newer, doesn't fully understand house hacking and why it's so beneficial, maybe talk to us a little bit, Henry, about, you know, the top benefits that you see.

• 3:59Henry Washington?

  The best benefit is reducing what most people's largest living expense is. And that's typically housing. And so house hacking allows you to reduce that. And in some cases, eliminate that expense. Because the income you produce through renting out the other units or monetizing the property in some other way typically covers the majority, if not all of your mortgage. And so. You know, I speak about this because I did it. You know, I bought a single family home with a with an ADU. And this was back in 2018, I think I bought it. And so we lived in the three bed, two bath house and we rented out the one bed, one bath house.

• 4:40Henry Washington?

  Our mortgage, I think it was around 1,200 or 1,300 dollars at the time. And we were able to rent out the one bedroom unit for about just under a thousand bucks a month. And so we had to pay somewhere between two and 300 dollars a month of our mortgage after we brought in that income.

• 4:59Dave Meyer?

  Amazing.

• 4:59Henry Washington?

  And prior to us buying and moving into this two family, we lived in a single family where we were paying about 1,500 dollars a month with no income. And so what that allowed us to do, and I think the key to house hacking is this part I'm about to say, it's not the fact that you offset your mortgage. It's what you do with the savings.

• 5:20Dave Meyer?

  Right.

• 5:20Henry Washington?

  That helps you be successful. And I think that that's the thing people don't talk about. And so what we did was we were used to paying 1,500 and we didn't stop paying 1,500. We just paid the additional into a savings account because we didn't want to adjust our lifestyle to not have that bill because at some point we are going to have a mortgage again. And, you know, I didn't want lifestyle creep to take away from the savings that we were getting. And so we just banked that money every month so that we could use it as a down payment on the next home.

• 5:50Dave Meyer?

  That's a perfect explanation of the benefit and why it still works because as Henry just showed you, you don't need to cash flow on a house hack to make it work. I think one of the top three, five deals I've ever done was a house hack I lived in. I still paid a little bit out of pocket every month, but I lived in this house for two years and probably similar. I think like, you know, I was living by myself. It was probably 1,500 bucks down to two, 300, very similar change. And I saved so much money over that time. It also like happened to correspond with the time where I got my master's degree and my earnings went up and I just could start saving money. And like I had bought deals before that, but I think it was like really when I start to

• 6:34Dave Meyer?

  see like, oh, I can actually build a portfolio.

• 6:37Henry Washington?

  Yeah.

• 6:37Dave Meyer?

  You know, I'm no longer thinking about like, how do I borrow money or partner with people? It's like, oh, I could just save the money and finance that renovation, or I can save the money up and buy another house hack in the in the next couple of years. And that was just like a huge unlock. But I want to talk about two other things that I just love about house hacking. Number one, it's just, I feel like it's training wheels if you're starting out. It's a great way to learn how to be a property manager because you're onsite. Like you see everything. You learn how systems work in a building. You learn how to take care of the outside of a building. You learn what it's like to manage tenants. And I will get into this. I also think everyone's so dramatic about managing tenants.

• 7:20Henry Washington?

  I agree.

• 7:20Dave Meyer?

  But you know, I just think it's an awesome way to learn. And it's not just for new people. But I just wanted to say like, that I think is a really big value. And then the last thing is the older I get, man, I have full circle, old person approach to investing. I'm like, how do I save taxes? And how do I get stable debt in my life?

• 7:39Henry Washington?

  Yep.

• 7:40Dave Meyer?

  And like, I love that about house hacking. You can get a 30 year fixed rate mortgage on two to four units. That is a dream. Like you can get multiple units, fixed rate debt. It's beautiful. When my wife and I were looking houses, we looked at two properties where we were going to house hack.

• 7:54Henry Washington?

  Yeah.

• 7:54Dave Meyer?

  I'm 38 years old. Like I would keep doing it. I bought my first house hack 15 years ago. I'd keep doing it.

• 8:00Henry Washington?

  It doesn't stop.

• 8:01Dave Meyer?

  Yeah, I know. Like, I wound up not doing it because I found what I think will be a better live in flip, right? Because there's just a different, but like, I'm still looking for ways to earn money off my primary residence.

• 8:11Henry Washington?

  Two things. A live in flip is a house hack, in my opinion, because you're monetizing your personal residence.

• 8:15Dave Meyer?

  That's true. By your definition, it is.

• 8:17Henry Washington?

  And secondly, like technically, I'm still house hacking. Because what we did was we saved up that that difference in mortgage payment. So we were saving about a thousand dollars a month or more that we were used to paying in mortgage and we were just putting in savings account. When we bought the house we live in now, we use that money we saved as our down payment. We rented out the unit we were living in and then we just take that surplus. And we use that surplus as part of our mortgage payment at our new house. So that duplex is technically covering half of the mortgage payment at my, at my current home.

• 8:49Dave Meyer?

  It's the gift that keeps on giving.

• 8:50Henry Washington?

  It's brilliant. And then now we've bought 20 acres and we're going to build a home on that. I'm gonna have four units, so three Airbnbs and then part of my party born will have a two bedroom unit in it. Those short-term rental units, we're going to use to offset the mortgage.

• 9:06Dave Meyer?

  Yeah, exactly. It's amazing. And like, again, training wheels, because you're taking care of a short-term rental, sometimes it can be hard taking care of it in your backyard, a little bit easier. You know, it just, yeah, it just still, it makes everything just a little bit easier. So I mean, these are some of the many benefits. The other thing I will just mention here is that it is more scalable than people think. Like you can do one of these a year. Probably one of the most common ways I see people scale quickly is this one a year house hack strategy. Do you, you see this, right?

• 9:39Henry Washington?

  I tell people this all the time. I'm like, just think, just think about it for, for a second. If you are, especially if you're young and single, why wouldn't you buy a duplex a year? Live in one unit, rent out the other unit. Then after you've been there for six months, start shopping for your next one. Do it again on a conventional, so you can do an FHA loan for the first one, do a conventional loan for the second one, and then do it again.

• 10:02Dave Meyer?

  Yep.

• 10:02Henry Washington?

  And let's just say you did that three times.

• 10:04Dave Meyer?

  You get six to 12 units.

• 10:06Henry Washington?

  Six to 12 units that you got in with a 5% down payment. Rents are going to increase over time. Your property value is going to go up over time. And if you never bought another property in 30 years, those things are paid off and they supplement your retirement. That's amazing.

• 10:21Dave Meyer?

  Like depending on the properties you do, you pay those off, that could be your retirement.

• 10:24Henry Washington?

  Absolutely.

• 10:25Dave Meyer?

  The right 12 units, like the one I was talking about, that the three unit that I used to house hack, the one I was talking about before, like, to me, in my mind, that's my retirement. Like it generates, I think it's like already right now, 8,500 a month in rent. I've already owned it for 11 years. So when I pay that off, like the rent's probably 10 grand a month, that one property, right? I bought that, was I cash flowing? No, but like it's just, I bought a good deal.

• 10:50Henry Washington?

  Right.

• 10:50Dave Meyer?

  And I'm holding on to it. This isn't rocket science stuff, but like it's going to be amazing. Like you could do that two or three times, just fundamentally change your entire life.

• 11:00Henry Washington?

  Listen, if you're single or you're married with no kids.

• 11:05Henry Washington?

  You should buy a duplex, triplex or quadplex a year and do that every year until you're not single anymore and your spouse says, I will never share walls again. Just keep doing it. Just keep doing it.

• 11:17Dave Meyer?

  Yeah. I mean, I don't know if it's me because I, you know, my mom lives in apartment. You know, I'm used to apartment buildings. Like I just don't think it's weird to share walls. Like it's just a normal thing.

• 11:26Henry Washington?

  There's a lot of places in the country where that's very normal.

• 11:28Dave Meyer?

  Yeah. I'm going to throw in one other thing. It's probably the lowest risk real estate investing strategy out there. If you are trying to get in and you don't want to take a lot of risk, buying something that lowers your living expenses is lowering your overall financial risk, even though you're buying an asset is lowering your overall risk. And that's an incredible thing, especially in today's day and age. It's good hedge against inflation. There's always some risk, but there are very few ways that it can go wrong with house hacking. All right. So now you've heard enough about why we love house hacking so much, but we got to talk about how to update your approach to house hacking in 2025 and how to go out and find great house hacks. We'll get into that right after this break. This week's bigger news is brought to you by the Fundrise flagship fund. Invest in private

• 12:13Dave Meyer?

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• 14:24Dave Meyer?

  Welcome back to the Big Pockets Podcast. Me and Henry are here talking about house hacking. Before, we shared our love letters to house hacking. And now, we're going to talk a little bit about modern update to how to go about house hacking. So as you said earlier, housing is more expensive relative to rents. It's probably not going to offset as much as your income as it would have a couple of years ago. We should be honest about that. But you also actually said there are ways that it's gotten easier to house hack, particularly around debt products. Can you tell us more about that?

• 14:56Henry Washington?

  I think it was back in 2023, where Fannie basically came out and said, 5% down on all two to four units is what will be required going forward. It used to be you would call around and you'd want 5% down. And once they found out you were buying a multi, they'd say, no, you have to put 20.

• 15:13Dave Meyer?

  They'd laugh at you.

• 15:14Henry Washington?

  Yeah. That's not the case anymore. It's pretty industry standard now, 5% down. Also, lenders know how to underwrite these better. Before, it was difficult to qualify for how much a multifamily was going to cost you, because multifamilies would typically cost more than single families. But now, they know how to underwrite them and they'll actually consider the rents for the property you're looking to buy as income for you. And that increases the income that you earn essentially allowing you to qualify for more. So it's easier to get approved to do these now. The process is a lot easier now than it was prior to 2023, just to get approved to do these house hacks.

• 15:57Henry Washington?

  And then there's other loan products that are available to you to allow you to buy a house hack. So you can, everybody is pretty familiar now with the FHA 203K loan, which is a loan that allows you to use an FHA loan, but also get money to renovate the property.

• 16:13Dave Meyer?

  Great product if you want to do a house hack, yeah.

• 16:16Henry Washington?

  Fannie Mae has its own version, which is a Fannie Mae Homestyle renovation loan. It's a conventional loan, so you'll have to put the 5% down, but it will allow you to buy the property and make the improvements. So the property will give you money for the improvements. And then Freddie Mac has the Freddie Mac Choicer renovation loan. And then there's a VA renovation loan that will allow you to use a VA loan and give you the money to renovate the property. Now, there's going to be red tape with all of these. You have to find a contractor who's willing to put up with a lot of the hoops that they'll have to jump through in order for you to get the renovation money to pay them. But again, red tape doesn't mean you shouldn't do it. Red tape just means go find the contractor who's going to work with you through this process.

• 16:59Henry Washington?

  There are contractors that probably specialize in working with people who do these things. You just have to go looking for these people.

• 17:06Dave Meyer?

  The whole context of this conversation is how to adapt house hacking for 2025. This is a perfect example because we're seeing construction slowing down. And although in some markets it's still hot, hard to find contractors, I am in the midst of my first time flip right now. And honestly, it hasn't been that hard to find trades and contractors right now. And from everything Henry tells me, James tells me when we're talking on the market, it sounds like it's getting a little easier. Would you say that?

• 17:35Henry Washington?

  Absolutely.

• 17:35Dave Meyer?

  So like, this is the kind of thing where, yeah, it's a little bit more expensive, but everything in real estate or investing in general is a trade off. And so, yeah, some things are getting a little harder. But as Henry has really accurately pointed out here, some things are getting easier, loan products being one of them, and maybe availability of contractors who are willing to take on some of these awesome loan products is another benefit of the market that we're in right now.

• 18:01Henry Washington?

  And from a timing perspective, I think this is a great time because inventory is up. And we're going into the holiday season, which means buyer demand will go down. And that means that there's more opportunity for someone who is looking to get a property that has some wiggle room in it, or that has some distress on it, because there's going to be less buyers right now. And so if you have an opportunity to now go in and start making offers on these properties at lower than what they're asking for, and potentially getting that offer accepted. So if you can come in, find yourself a property that has some equity or room in it, and then make an offer to them at a price point that makes sense for you, and then utilize one

• 18:44Henry Washington?

  of these loan products, you can get yourself a good deal and get the money to renovate the property. You move into a house with some equity, and now you're house hacking, and you are covering the majority of your mortgage.

• 18:56Dave Meyer?

  If Henry is saying that this is a good time to go find a house hack, I absolutely believe him. Just like from a macro perspective, it's also a good time to do it because rents just super expensive. And so it's like when you do the calculation of how much money you're saving, yeah, it's your mortgage is going to be more. That is true. But what you're replacing with that mortgage is also way higher, and you're going to fix that mortgage rate, right? So even though your rents could keep going up in the next couple of years, probably will, that mortgage rate you're replacing that rent with, that will stay the same. And so that that does sort of make it another good time to do this because rents, I think they're going to start picking back up in 2026. So it's another reason to do it.

• 19:40Henry Washington?

  I mean, if we look at the house hack I talked about that I did, that I still own, when I moved into it, we were renting the one bedroom, I think I said 900. I think we originally rented it for somewhere around like 800. That one bedroom now rents for 1,200.

• 19:55Dave Meyer?

  Wow.

• 19:56Henry Washington?

  And the three bed, two bath that we were living in when we moved out, I think we rented it for 14 or 1500 dollars. That three bed, two bath now rents for somewhere closer to 1,800 dollars.

• 20:07Dave Meyer?

  Wow.

• 20:07Henry Washington?

  So we're getting just under three grand or right around three grand a month out of that property. But my mortgage, because we got fixed rate debt, is still 1,200 bucks.

• 20:15Dave Meyer?

  Still the same. Yep. And that will keep happening as long as you hold on to that property. I agree with you. Inventory is going up. These deals are going to become more abundant. What are some things, you know, people should include in their buy box if they're looking for a house hack?

• 20:33Henry Washington?

  So what I would be looking for is something where your living expense is going to be cut down dramatically. So if you can go from paying $2,000 a month down to paying eight, nine hundred, a thousand dollars a month, that's a win. You're able to pocket a thousand dollars a month and then use that to save up for your next investment property.

• 20:52Dave Meyer?

  You're also saving post-tax money. So it's basically the equivalent of saving like thirteen hundred dollars a month.

• 20:58Henry Washington?

  And what you want to look for is, I'm not saying go out and buy a deal because at some point you're going to move out of this property, right? And then you're going to have to rent it out. But when you're doing your research, what you want to be able to do is factor in rent growth over time. So what you want to know is, if I have to move out of it tomorrow, is it going to cash flow? No, probably not. Okay. So you need to understand, can I afford to carry this property if things go south and I don't live there for long enough for rents to cover? Don't put yourself in a terrible financial situation because we don't know, you don't know what the future is going to hold. So if you're buying a property, let's say, and then life happens and you have to move and you have to go rent somewhere and you want to rent this property out, can you afford to cover that property if you have

• 21:42Henry Washington?

  to rent out both units? In other words, if the rent from both units doesn't cover the mortgage, if you're not living in the property, can you cover the difference long-term to hold that property? That's how you protect yourself. It's just, you want to be able to make sure that you can carry that in the worst-case scenario. But when you're shopping for these properties, what you want to do is figure out with rent growth, how long is it going to take you to get to a point where you're not going to have to cover anymore? So let's say you buy a property today, and if you had to rent out both units, you would have to come out of pocket three or $400 a month. But if rent growth is going to improve year over year, maybe in two years or three years, that $300 is absorbed by rent growth,

• 22:26Henry Washington?

  and now it's a break even if you have to move out, or now you're cash flowing. So you have to look at what is rent growth in that area of town or in that market that you're looking for, and how long would you have to carry that mortgage if you weren't going to live in that property and you had to move out right away? So you're just preparing to protect yourself if things don't go perfectly.

• 22:46Dave Meyer?

  All right, we got to take one more quick break, but after this, we're going to talk about ways investors can make their house hacks even more efficient and some different flavors of house hack, as Henry has alluded to. We'll be right back. For my wife's birthday, I wanted to make her a new website for her landscape design business. So I researched a lot of different options. I tried out a couple, but honestly, it was really overwhelming. It was pretty time consuming and still, the site wasn't coming out the way I wanted it to. Then I tried Hostinger and everything was super simple. I asked Hostinger's AI to build a clean site for her business and it had a working version up in minutes. No coding or designer needed. Plus, its AI

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• 26:04Dave Meyer?

  Welcome back to the BiggerPockets Podcast. David Henry here, talking about house hacking. Henry, you have sort of opened up the definition of house hacking. You're broadening our horizons here. It's not just small multifamily. You said it's any way you can use your primary residence to improve your financial situation. So like, what are some other ways? I think the bread and butter classic, table stakes, is a two to four unit. You live in one, you rent out the others. What are the other things that you think work? And do some of them work better, I guess, than the standard approach?

• 26:39Henry Washington?

  Yeah, I mean, I think there's going to be plenty of people listening to this that are like, "Well, I get it, guys, but I already have my primary residence and it's a single family, so I'm stuck." That's not true. You can still monetize, right? And so, for the people who are in that boat, ways that you can monetize your primary residence. Now, mind you, this is going to require some level of uncomfortability. Wealth is not built in your comfort zone. If you have a single family and you want to monetize it, you can. But you're gonna have to sacrifice some level of comfortability. The more uncomfortable you're willing to get, the more profitable you're going to be. So let's just keep that in mind. So obviously there's the Craig Curlop, just rent out rooms, right?

• 27:24Henry Washington?

  Dude was living in his living room with a curtain up and renting out all the bedrooms. Super uncomfortable.

• 27:28Dave Meyer?

  But I will say, there's a way to do that one with where you're not living on a couch. Like you could just buy a four bedroom house and have a bedroom, right? Like that is a format of living. I don't know about you, I've lived in for 10 years with a roommate, you know, like that's just having a roommate. You're just the landlord for your roommate.

• 27:48Henry Washington?

  Absolutely.

• 27:48Dave Meyer?

  That's not that weird.

• 27:49Henry Washington?

  I lived in the master bedroom. I had my own bathroom. We rented out the other two bedrooms. I had roommates, we shared the kitchen. It was fine, like it's just normal having a roommate. So yes.

• 27:59Dave Meyer?

  Right.

• 27:59Henry Washington?

  You can do that and have roommates. You can use Airbnb and short term rent a room so that you don't have somebody living there all the time. You can do something a little even more creative. And if you've got like a cool space in your house, maybe you've got a office space that's super cool. Or maybe you can curate a cool space. You can use apps like Peer Space to rent rooms out by the hour for people to come and record content or film commercials. Another thing you can rent out amenities you have. If you have a pool, you can use apps like Swimply to rent out your pool to people who want to come and use your pool by the hour.

• 28:32Dave Meyer?

  Nice.

• 28:33Henry Washington?

  You can also use apps like Neighbor where you can rent out space in your garage or a shed or your driveway for people to just store stuff there. And you can make money doing that. If you've got land or yard space, you can use an app called Sniff Spot, which is basically people renting private dog parks. There are options for you. All of these are things that exist. And if they exist, that means there's people that are using them and making money. So I would encourage you to just do a little bit of research and figure out what are people paying for? Do you have an amenity that somebody might pay to rent or use? And there's probably a platform or an app. That will allow you to bridge the gap between the people looking for those amenities

• 29:18Henry Washington?

  and then you being the person that has that amenity. The other house hacking method is I think the one that you're doing, which is the live-in flip, which is super financially beneficial. So you could go buy a property with an FHA 203K or one of these other loan products we talked about in the previous segment. You could buy the property, you could fix it up, and then you could sell the property and move out of it and do it again. The cool part about it is if you live there for two years, then when you sell that property, you don't have to pay the capital gains taxes. And you can literally pocket that money and go and do your next one or go and buy another multifamily. The live-in flip, I think, is the house hack people don't really talk about.

• 30:02Dave Meyer?

  I will say, I'm doing it where we're going to renovate the house and add equity, but I don't think we're going to sell it after two years. Like, my wife and I are just at a point in our lives where we just probably are going to stay here. But like, we bought with that intention. And I think if you are willing to sell and move every two years, which is, again, a level of discomfort, for sure. Man, you can make a lot of money. Mindy Jensen, the host of the BP Money Show, has been doing this for like 20 years. That's, that's all she does. She doesn't even really own rental property. She just does that over and over and makes tons of money doing it.

• 30:35Henry Washington?

  Yeah, or think about it from the perspective of like, a lot of people have aspirations to own a big, beautiful home. And a lot of people probably can't quite figure out how to get there from maybe the spot that they're in. Maybe they don't make enough money in their day job to afford that big, beautiful home that they want. And they'd have to get a lot of raises and promotions before they get there. The live-in flip method is a way that you could get there. Because let's say you bought a house under, undervalued. You do the FHA 203K. You get a loan, you fix it up, and then you sell it to the point where you're making $100, $200, $300,000 of profit because you're going to live in it for a couple of years.

• 31:18Henry Washington?

  It's going to appreciate on top of the fact that you bought it undervalued. And so now you sell that property, you got a couple hundred thousand dollars that you can put down on that dream home.

• 31:28Dave Meyer?

  It's basically getting the benefit of a 1031 for your primary residence without all the pain in the ass anxiety inducing things of a 1031.

• 31:36Henry Washington?

  Yeah, you could do a live-in flip, live there for two to three years, sell that bad boy and get to your dream home a lot faster.

• 31:42Dave Meyer?

  All right, we do have to get out of here in just a minute, Henry, but before we go, I want your one minute rant to people who say that this is too uncomfortable. You just talked about this, but like, what is your response to that?

• 31:54Henry Washington?

  Why are you here? Most people are here because they're looking for a way to build some level of wealth. Wealth isn't built in your comfort zone. You're gonna have to get uncomfortable at some point. Dave has rental properties and has done real estate deals that were probably put him in a position where he felt a little uncomfortable.

• 32:14Dave Meyer?

  I lived in my friend's grandma's basement for three years.

• 32:17Henry Washington?

  That uncomfortability has led him to wealth building. I have done things that were uncomfortable, but that uncomfortability has led to wealth building. If you think you're going to achieve wealth or financial freedom without getting uncomfortable, I've got bad news for you. You're probably not going to get there. Now, I'm not saying you've got to get so uncomfortable that you're not going to enjoy your life. I've enjoyed my wealth building process, but it's required me to get uncomfortable. There's a line. You've got to figure out where that line is for you, where your line of uncomfortability is. And where that is, you can start to build some wealth.

• 32:59Henry Washington?

  When we went to first house hack, I told you I bought a, I bought a three, two, and then I had a one, one, 80 U. I tried to get my wife to have us live in the one bedroom so that we could rent the three bedroom. Cause we would be able to save more money, because we'd bring in more money that way.

• 33:15Dave Meyer?

  That was too much.

• 33:16Henry Washington?

  And that was too uncomfortable for her. And she said, that was the line.

• 33:20Dave Meyer?

  Fine.

• 33:20Henry Washington?

  I'm not going to live in the one bedroom. We're going to have to live in the three, two, which means we'll build wealth a little more slowly. That's what we did. We had to figure out where that line of uncomfortability is versus profit.

• 33:30Dave Meyer?

  I love this. I get to be the optimist here. I get to give the good news. I feel like I'm always reminding people about risk and all this kind of stuff, but Henry is right. There is some level of discomfort in this, but the good news is it's really not that uncomfortable.

• 33:47Henry Washington?

  It's not that bad.

• 33:48Dave Meyer?

  The grand scheme of things.

• 33:49Henry Washington?

  At all.

• 33:49Dave Meyer?

  It's really like, I think it's pretty dramatic how, how people react to house hacking. They're like, oh my God, I have to share a wall. It's like, of course you do. Like, have you never lived in an apartment? Like, you've never had a roommate?

• 34:03Henry Washington?

  I don't know if you know this, but that wall's not see-through.

• 34:06Dave Meyer?

  Exactly. You can close the door if you want to. Like, it's totally up to you. So I just think like, man, on the spectrum of discomfort to opportunity, house hacking is like truly the best. Like, I still think even though there's like this little bit of discomfort, the upside is so big. It's just like, I, I think it's so overblown that this is hard to do. It's not. It's a gift. Like, the fact that you can do this, the fact that you can buy a four unit, putting 3.5% down with fixed rate debt, is one of the best investments in the world. Like, it truly is. Like, other countries don't have that. This is incredible. You should go do it.

• 34:50Henry Washington?

  Amen.

• 34:51Dave Meyer?

  All right. I'm sweating now. I'm crying. I need to go.

• 34:56Henry Washington?

  I like Dave Rantz. Dave Rantz are my new favorite thing.

• 34:59Dave Meyer?

  I know. All right. Well, thank you for being here, Henry. Thank you all so much for listening to this. I think that this was a lot of fun. As you can tell, we're both really passionate about this. Genuinely think it's a great option. If you like the show, please give us a comment. Share it with a friend who needs to hear this. We would really appreciate that as well. Henry, good seeing you, man.

• 35:19Henry Washington?

  You as well.

• 35:20Dave Meyer?

  And thank you all for listening. We'll see you next time.

• 35:53Speaker 04

  Hey, listen! Power up your play with Nintendo Switch 2 and experience Link's legendary adventure, now reborn in vibrant detail on our fastest and most powerful system yet.

• 36:07Speaker 04

  And harness the power of the Ocarina with the built-in microphone.

• 36:15Speaker 04

  The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, a Nintendo Switch 2 exclusive. Game and system sold separately. Game rated everyone 10 and up.