How I got here
I bought my first place.
I was earning $15 an hour and running rental numbers on my lunch break. Everyone said wait. I bought anyway. It was the least glamorous decision I ever made, and the one that changed everything.
A duplex, thanks to Mom.
My parents put the money down and I did all the work. We bought a duplex together, and I learned that a good deal plus sweat equity beats a fat bank account every time.
I quit the day after closing.
I got my real estate license so I could let myself into listings. Then I bought a duplex and gave notice the day after we closed, December 31st. Six months later I was making more selling houses on the side than I had all year at the day job.
✎ best resignation of my lifeI became a builder.
Owning was not enough. I wanted to make the thing, not just buy it. So I started building houses from the dirt up.
Top agent, more dirt.
I became the top agent at my brokerage and poured every commission back into more builds and auction buys. The point was never to sell houses. It was to keep them.
Two parents, zero day jobs.
Our daughter arrived, my husband left his 9-to-5, and we became full-time investors and brand-new parents in the same year. We figured it out as we went.
I started writing it down.
Friends kept asking the same five questions. What is an LLC actually for? Do I need a CPA? How do you sleep at night? I started a tiny email list to answer them once. That list grew into this blog and the 26,000 people now reading it.
Bigger doors, smaller suitcases.
We paused building to buy our first apartment complex and closed on it later that year. Then we took our three-year-old on a ten-week trip around Southeast Asia. The portfolio kept paying while we were gone.
COVID made us RVers.
When the world shut down, we bought an RV and went full-time on the road. Turns out a portfolio runs just fine from a campground.
Half on the road, half across the world.
We split the year between the RV and farther-flung places. Our kid got a geography lesson. We got a life that did not need a return flight.
We landed in Phoenix.
After years of moving, we picked a home base in Phoenix, Arizona. Roots at last, with a runway to keep traveling.
More apartments.
We added more apartment units to the portfolio. Bigger deals, same boring math that has always worked.
Ryker arrived.
Our son was born. Two kids now, both growing up thinking rental math is normal dinner-table talk.
Travel, and a DADU.
A year heavy on travel, and we broke ground on a DADU project. The building itch never really goes away.
Back to building.
We are building again and running the portfolio remotely, writing the playbook I wish someone had handed me when I started. The next decade is about doing less, but doing it better.
