Tired of Renting? How to Save for Your First Property in ONE Year (or Less)

Ashley:
Getting started. In real estate investing often feels impossible when you’re paying down debt or you’re battling the cost of eggs at the supermarket. But today’s guest proves that with strategic side hustles and some determined savings, you can get that first property that will set you up to scale. Aaron Mann recently purchased his first single family home after saving for over a year. So what makes his journey particularly interesting is how he was actually able to leverage multiple income streams to make that happen. So whether you’re struggling to save your first down payment or looking to accelerate your investing journey, you’ll want to learn Aaron’s practical approach to building wealth through real estate and side hustles. This is the Real Estate Rookie podcast. I am Ashley Kehr, and today we have Garrett Brown with us while Tony is out. So Garrett, thank you so much for being here.

Garrett:
Always an honor to join and always fun to talk about side hustles and getting your investing journey starting. So I’m super excited for today’s episode

Ashley:
And also a big welcome to Aaron Mann. We’re super excited to have you back on the show.

Aaron:
Yeah, it’s great to be back. Honestly, when I came on here a year ago and told you I was starting to look into investing into a property, I just wanted to come back and make sure that you all know that I wasn’t a liar.

Ashley:
You held true to your word. Okay. So Aaron, let’s start a little bit with your background. What specifically sparked your interest and where are you now?

Aaron:
Well, my wife basically is what started my investing journey in telling me We live in Chicago, rent is very expensive. You work with a bunch of people that invest in real estate. I’m trying to learn as much as possible so that I can try to convince you that we got to get out of this apartment hustle, so to speak. So basically we were starting to pay rent at around the 1800 marker. And at that point, I remember hearing a rookie episode and my wife remembers hearing a rookie episode where they were talking about why am I paying someone else’s mortgage when I could be paying my own? And if we can find a monthly payment that is roughly the same or heck even cheaper right now than a monthly rental payment. Let’s do that. Let’s jump right in.

Garrett:
Well, you recently purchased this first property, so walk us through some of the journey of how that happened from the search to all the way to the finish line.

Aaron:
A hundred percent. So we started off with, oddly enough, the rookie bootcamp just so we could get a grounding basis of, we didn’t even know where to start, but as we were looking at different markets and different potential ideas, we came up with the solution of we should look in Kenosha, Wisconsin, which is about an hour north of Chicago. It’s my hometown for a property that we can house hack and live in with potential tenants and whatnot. So that’s the strategy we decided to go with. And the main reason we chose Kenosha, Wisconsin is the market is still stable. The town is very up and coming. It’s got a ton of different manufacturing facilities and different factories and a lot of potential basically for different renters. So once we picked a place, we knew the strategy we wanted to take, we decided to look at what our pricing options were and to skip the 60 house tours that we went on in Kenosha, Wisconsin driving an hour

Ashley:
60.

Aaron:
Yeah, it felt like 60. It might be somewhere in the mid forties, but it felt like 60.

Ashley:
Wow.

Aaron:
Yeah, it’s a lot. But to skip all of those, I’m going to go right to the one where we finally landed on, which was this lovely deep dark Dan basement that I’m talking to you from now until it’s completely finished. But oddly enough, we came in and looked at the description, 183 days on market, which is a long time for all of the other listings that we were seeing. And in the description it said that they were a motivated seller, that they were just looking to offload the property. So we said, let’s give it a shot, let’s give it a try. And we knew that our first property was not going to be the perfect one. We needed to make sacrifices or know that we could fix something or what have you. We were immediately in love with this property, knowing the minor fixes that it needed in order to get our plan off of the ground. And it went in and about. I know that we like to talk about numbers two 40 was the asking price for a three bed, two bath home, which we were pretty excited about that.

Ashley:
Aaron, real quick before you go into the numbers, was this the first property that you offered on?

Aaron:
It is not. It is not the first property that we offered on.

Ashley:
Okay. Yeah. So you tore the 40 to 60. How many of those did you actually put in offers on before you got this deal?

Aaron:
To be honest about only two or three other ones potentially because we knew what we were capable of making for a down payment and we knew what we needed to ask for basically. And to be fair, we were asking for a decent chunk of concessions when we were jumping into this, knowing what we needed to do and what fixes we needed to make on those properties that we did make offers on this one we landed on, initially we asked for two 40 their asking price, and then I believe it was about 11 in concessions. I feel like a pretty good balance for something that had been on the market for that long.

Ashley:
And Erin, what is a concession? You wanted popcorn and candy to

Aaron:
Yes, and the house needed to be filled with it, especially in the unfinished basement. No, it’s basically asking for some money to help with the down payment and cover closing costs and all of that fun stuff with your agent and whatnot to kind of ease the blowback, so to speak, or at least that’s the way I like to describe it.

Ashley:
Yeah, so basically you’re asking prices to 40, but you’re asking for them to basically give you back 11,000 of that.

Aaron:
And oddly enough, they came back and they said, no concessions, and we would like you to pay the full price of the home, which is not is a weird negotiation tactic of upping the price for an initial offer. That doesn’t sound like negotiation at all. No, not at all. So we said, okay, we’ll pay 2 49 the estimated cost of the home, but we still want those concessions pretty please. And they said, well, I mean, how do you feel about ten five? We said, sure, absolutely, let’s do it.

Ashley:
They just couldn’t give you one thing that you wanted.

Aaron:
Here’s the best part. We got the house inspected and the inspector found a couple of things. We wanted to definitely have them do the repairs on some stuff with the hvac, the electric, that sort of stuff. And we said, okay, we still want the same deal. Can you go in and fix that? They said, no. We said, okay, how can we make this work? They said, well, what if we just give you another 500 in concessions? It’s the original number. Sure. You know what? Fine. That’s absolutely fine.

Garrett:
I have a pretty interesting question that I hear a lot on the house hacking side is, did you need to be convinced to move in with tenants or did your wife need to be convinced or were y’all both on board? I’ve never house hacked, but I could see that that would be my kind of drawback. How did y’all kind of work that out?

Aaron:
Yeah, it’s definitely a discussion that needs to happen before you make the leap into even thinking about house hacking. I mean, you’re going to be sharing your space with these people who you interview them and you do the background checks on, but you don’t know. We, however, were both very board out of the gate because we had been living in the rental market for just oh so long in Chicago, Illinois, and that gets to be very costly. So we said, you know what? In order to get our investing journey started, we need a leg up somewhere. And we felt that this was the best option and we were very comfortable with having roommates. We’ve had roommates a good chunk of our lives, I think. So yeah, we didn’t have any problem jumping into it, but I know that it is not for everybody.

Garrett:
Yeah, sacrifice takes a lot though to get to that point that you’re looking for in your investing journey though, so that’s good to hear that y’all are able to work that out and good information for other rookies out there that may be on the fence about that, that sometimes there’s a little sacrifice you have to make to get those big gains going forward for you.

Ashley:
So Aaron, the numbers on the deal, you purchased it for 2 49 and you got your concessions of 11,000. What did you end up renting it out for?

Aaron:
So we’re still in the process of doing the fixes of the home and whatnot to make sure that it is tenant ready, but we are going to be renting out each bedroom at 1100. These are massive bedrooms with two closets per bedroom. They’re both connected to the single bathroom. However, what we’re going to be including in that price is you’ve got your full service kitchen, you’ve got, you don’t have to pay for any of the amenities. We’re going to have a biweekly or tri-weekly cleaning service come in to clean all of the community areas, including the bathrooms as well, not the bedrooms to keep that private. And obviously each bedroom gets its own lock and whatnot, so you have your sense of privacy in the home. But we try to make it, we’re wanting to make it as comfortable as possible for tenants to stay here and feel like it’s a comfortable shared space.

Ashley:
So we have to take a quick break, but when we come back, we’re going to hear more from Aaron on his house hack and also how he was actually able to save the money and increase his income with side hustles. We’ll be right back.

Garrett:
Now, let’s get back into the show with Aaron. You save for over a year to make this purchase happen, and that’s usually one of the biggest drawbacks we hear is being able to have that down payment that you need to get into a house. And you did a great job with the concessions. That’s something I always advise people to look into if you’re having trouble with the down payment. So what specific saving strategies did you implement and how did you stay disciplined throughout this entire process at 60 tour home tours or whatever number we land on with that,

Aaron:
I cannot stress this enough. Weekly finance meetings, going through your budget and making sure what’s coming out, what’s coming in and where you can penny pinch to not only pay down debt as per usual, but also set money aside to make sure that you have exactly what you need in a given timeframe to make that happen. Now you mentioned that we saved in a year. Yes, a hundred percent. Could we have extended that timeline a thousand percent. I think that one of the things I learned during this entire process is instead of squeezing your stress limit of Oh my God, we have to make this happen. This is my goal. Make sure you have that timeline, but also realize that it’s flexible, it’s adjustable. You don’t want to jump into something too quickly and then before it’s too late realize you’ve done something you can’t take back, so to speak. But yeah, that’s where I stress that to a lot of people, and that’s also my wife’s fault. She’ll send me constant reminders of, we’re having a finance meeting tonight. It’s like, okay. Yeah, a hundred percent

Ashley:
Aaron. So with the saving and once you hit that goal, was there any hesitation of parting with that money after you had worked so hard to save this amount of money? Did at any point you say, oh my God, how can we part with this? Look at how nice it looks at our bank account.

Aaron:
A lot of people would probably look at that and go, well, no, I want to use this for something else. Absolutely not. I had no trouble letting this money go. We were in a situation where we were just tired of living in apartments, jumping from place to place, and we just said, you know what? Spend money to make money. This is a hundred percent where we need to put this right now. And we jumped at the chance to spend that money on this house. And that’s just my situation. Obviously I know that it is hard to let go of that amount of money, but for us it was just smooth sailing right out of the gate.

Garrett:
Yeah, you can just walk out and look at the house and go, there’s my new bank account right there for now.

Ashley:
Smells like money.

Garrett:
Yeah, we’re doing our weekly finance meetings while looking at our new bank accounts.

Ashley:
Erin, you host a show every Sunday on BiggerPockets Daily that talks about side hustles. So what are some of the side hustles you did during this time that you were saving to really boost your income?

Aaron:
Yeah, the daily hustle. So the side hustles that I utilize personally are going to be a lot of voiceover acting and local theater in Chicago as well, which a lot of people, when you think of theater, you don’t think, oh yeah, that’s where the money is for sure. But depending on where you work, how long you’ve worked there, the people you know start to take on contracts that do pay out pretty well. I would say more so in the voiceover industry have I found more and more success with repeat clientele and a network of folks that can really help you find that side hustle money when you’re in the game, so to speak. But yeah, this is where I’ve found the most success.

Garrett:
So I heard you mention earlier that you have a specific strategy for really making side hustles worth the time and effort. Can you break that down for us? And I don’t want to mess it up, so please explain for everyone,

Aaron:
Not at all. Yeah, absolutely. It’s called the moat method, and it is something that I have utilized throughout my life to get to where I am now with not only my full-time W2, but also my side hustle network. And one of my favorite things to talk about in the moat method is the fact that people are probably doing it, whether you know it or not, to break down each of the letters you’ve got maximize in the moat method where you are trying to figure out exactly where you fall in your side hustle journey, so to speak. What can I potentially do in my repertoire of skills that can lead to some sort of side hustle or some type of full-time job? For me it was computers, audio engineering, that sort of stuff that I would utilize this side hustle. Moving onto the next letter outline, which is what do I want this to turn into?

Aaron:
Do I want one specific side hustle where I can take that and run with it and just keep it my side hustle, or do I want to turn that into my full-time job and how do I get there? Moving onto the next letter, amplify, that’s where you hone in on that skill. That’s where you try to stand out above everyone else in that skillset for your own individual side hustle. For me, in voiceover audio engineering really played a huge part in that where when people are going out and doing auditions and whatnot, no one’s editing their own audio. They’re just sending in these recordings without making them sound like clean and pristine and whatnot. So me having that skillset and that sounding a bit better than everyone else’s audition that’s being sent in is very helpful. So that’s just an example of amplification as part of the moat method.

Aaron:
And last but not least, tailor, I tell people that they can stop at if they have their own network of stuff that they’re comfortable with for their side hustle. But Taylor is where you go a step even further beyond and say, I want to turn this into my full-time job. How do I do that? Whether it’s starting your own business or taking the skillset and the repertoire you’ve built for yourself, your portfolio, and finding a bigger group to join. So for me, audio engineering, BiggerPockets really just kind of made sense at that point, and I took those skills and I found a W2 with it. And that’s where I tell people, you can either take it that step further or if you’re comfortable where you at, keep the hustle going a hundred percent. But that is the moat method in a nutshell. I know that was a lot of information.

Garrett:
Moats are not only for Shrek or British castles. Castles we see now, so I’m glad to hear another acronym in our world.

Ashley:
When I was younger, that was a dream of mine to have a house with a moat around it and the drawbridge.

Garrett:
Yeah, you could still have that. Don’t give up Ashley.

Aaron:
Yeah, a hundred percent.

Ashley:
I’m sure there’s a short-term rental out there. I could buy that essay.

Garrett:
I will send you a listing if I see any moats. Then just to you.

Ashley:
So Aaron, what are some of the best side hustles you are seeing right now today that a rookie investor could do? I know in this week’s rookie newsletter that’s coming out, Tony included a section about couch flipping and kind of built out a couch flipping calculator for everyone. So what are some other ideas that you have?

Aaron:
A hundred percent, and that’s actually what I had a recent guest on. Nate Weinraub is a professional copywriter and SEO person. However, when he started out, he was actually taking products from overseas. He called them Ella Pants, and he would buy and mass these pants and then sell them online at a higher cost. So I think that the flipping aspect of that is also very prevalent and prominent, and I’ve seen a lot of people have a lot of success with that. So going on Facebook marketplace, going on these different places where people are just trying to get rid of things and then flipping them for a profit, a hundred percent very viable. Now when it comes to me personally, I think if you wanted to break into the voiceover industry also very doable. It is not a very high ceiling that you have to smash in order to do it, and you don’t have to be like this eccentric, phenomenal actor to do it either. A lot of people read ads for a living and that’s their whole shtick. So just a couple of different ones to focus on, but you hit the nail on the head with the flipping aspect of side hustles for sure.

Ashley:
Aaron, what’s the pay on a southern accent here? Does Garrett have an opportunity here?

Aaron:
Garrett? I know a couple people we’ll talk, we’ll talk we.

Garrett:
I’ve heard that I could be a voiceover from Matthew McConaughey if I wanted to, but not on just voiceover though. Definitely not. Anything else? What advice would you give to a rookie real estate investor that’s looking for a side hustle to accelerate getting into their first deal? How do you figure that out, what you’re trying to pursue exactly.

Aaron:
I think it’s a combination of the M in the moat method of figuring out what skill sets that you want to evolve or combine in order to figure out what could work for me for a side hustle. Really think outside of the box there. Me combining my computer and audio engineering skills with theater was a very odd combination that just kind of happened. It didn’t really come to mind until I started doing it. So really hone in on the maximize portion of moat method. The other thing I would definitely tell someone looking to get their first down payment is again, timeline. If I would’ve extended my timeline past a year and just focused on raking in whatever voiceover side hustle money that I could and just utilized that rather than other facets of money and assets to help for the down payment of the house, I could have done that. But it’s all about how fast or how slow you want this to occur. So never be stressed about that. So yeah, that’s what I would tell someone.

Ashley:
Erin, how much are you making approximately every month just from doing your side hustles?

Aaron:
Just from voiceover alone, I would say that I bring in about an extra one to two KA month, which in the voiceover industry, just for having a couple repeat clients, that’s pretty standard. And if I wanted to expand that, I probably could, but I stopped at the a amplify portion of moat where I’m comfortable with these clients and I know what I’m getting myself into and I’m not stretched too thin. So I think that bringing in that extra one to two KA month definitely helped. It was instrumental in getting the down payment for that process.

Ashley:
Aaron, before we go into our break here, do you have any real estate specific side hustles,

Aaron:
Real estate specific? No, not really. We’ve only had the one guest on so far, I would say. I have a couple friends in my group that do house flipping as part of their hustle that did eventually turn into their full-time gigs where they’re gutting out old houses and whatnot, doing drive-bys, making sure the property’s potentially abandoned or just not in great shape and making offers. But other than that, we haven’t really had a whole lot of other guests on. So if you would like to be a guest on the Daily Hustle segment of the BP Daily Show, you can go to biggerpockets.com/hustle and we can talk about that for sure. But yeah, we need more of those.

Garrett:
I think a good side hustle I’ve heard a lot of people do is it’s called Bird Dog, basically, where find an investor or a wholesaler or flipper in your area and you’re out driving for properties or trying to find dilapidated properties or something that may need work for them. And then they might give you a referral fee if you’re able to get it for you, get it for them, and you don’t even have to do the hard work of getting the seller and having to close with them and things. So after, that’s a pretty popular one for people, one level under wholesaling and they just call it bird dogging. So I’m sure somebody has a reason for why they call it that, but I personally don’t know why,

Ashley:
Because you send the dog out to get the bird and bring it back, you’re the person that’s going out to get the client and bring it back.

Garrett:
I’m not as southern as I sound. I don’t even know what bird talking is. Well,

Ashley:
They do that in the car industry too. So you could honestly probably go into a dealership too. It’s just a referral fee basically for the car dealers. And if you refer someone, and I remember the last time I had heard about it, a local dealership near me, it was a hundred bucks, they would pay out. So I mean, that’s pretty easy money to say, hey, to refer someone and if they end up buying, all you’re doing is making that connection. So yeah, that’s a great idea. Garrett, what about anything else in the short-term rental space, Garrett, do you think co-hosting should be a side hustle or should that strictly be something that you should build a business for?

Garrett:
I think if you’re getting, so we’re talking side, I think co-hosting is more of, that’s a big management lift, so that’s more of a business. But I think the side hustle portion, even myself in particular, I hire inspectors for my unit in general areas. So I have my cleaners that go in clean, they’ll take pictures, set everything up, but I will pay an inspector 25 to $75 depending on how big the house and where it’s at. And they’ll go in and do a big final check for me and maybe even send me some more pictures and tell me if there’s anything that’s a little off kilter. And then that way I have multiple people to have accountable, but at the same time, that’s a great side hustle that my cleaner does sometimes for me. I have a few of them, and this is a great side hustle to amplify her and come within the short-term rental space. And you learn a lot about the space to possibly be a co-host before you know it. So that’d be my good one in the STR space.

Ashley:
Okay, well, we have to take our final ad break, but we’ll be right back after this. And while we are gone, make sure you are subscribed to Real Estate Rookie on YouTube.

Garrett:
Welcome back from our break. Aaron, you’re already working on getting your second property for house hacking. Tell us about your buy box and your strategy with this.

Aaron:
That’s a way down the line plan, I would say, but

Ashley:
You’re planning that is the step.

Aaron:
Yeah, right, exactly. You keep it one step ahead. A hundred percent. So the main goal there is to, obviously we’re at the step where we need to get things ready on this property, then we need to find tenants for the house hack in the beginning. And then we’re going to be living here in this property potentially for about two years. And then after that, we’re going to be looking in the exact same area, Kenosha, Wisconsin, for another potential house hack where we’ve planned on the first two or three properties potentially being house hacks because we know what we’re looking for in a property and we know that we’re very comfortable with having glorified roommates basically, and trying to make sure everybody has a good experience while they’re living there. One of the ulterior motives is not the right word for it, but one of the ulterior motives that we’ve also had is we’re both very embedded in the arts. My wife is an opera singer. I’m doing a lot of theater and voiceover work. We would love to eventually put together some artist housing for different school programs, things of that nature. We’re very close to a college campus that has wonderful programs, Carthage College, and that is kind of the end goal, so to speak. But that is the plan.

Ashley:
Yeah, that’s awesome. Aaron, we actually have a little local arts program too in one of the towns near me, and they bought the art. They have an arts cafe, a little arts theater or whatever, this little organization, and they ended up buying a house next to the theater and they turned it into a short-term rental. But their primary use of it is when they do host different musicians or actors that are coming in to either teach sessions or to actually be in something that they’re performing, they will house them there and then they break even or generate a little income off of having it as a short-term rental. The times they’re not housing someone in there

Aaron:
Wonderful on so many fronts of, not only is it giving you what you need out of a property, but also you’re really kind of just giving back to the education system community, that sort of thing. So we’re pretty excited about that, but that is the long-term roadmap for sure.

Ashley:
So Erin, what about your future for side hustles? Do you see yourself taking, now that you’re hosting the show for BiggerPockets, do you see yourself getting shiny object syndrome? And next thing you know, we’re going to see you flipping couches in Wisconsin.

Aaron:
My hyper fixation with the audio industry is just so exciting to me, to the point where I have done research and taken classes on a lot of different how to set up your home so that it sounds the best. Are you putting in a home theater? Even if you’re not, why does your living room reverberate and sound like garbage sometimes? So I have started building, this is where my side hustle journey is taking me. I’ve started building acoustic panels from scratch that you would normally buy online for like 400 to $1,200 a pop. But I’m making these with the exact same materials for a fraction of the cost. And I actually have one right here. I’m going to just bring it over here for a second. One second, Lou, this bad boy, this thing.

Ashley:
Oh wow. Cool.

Aaron:
Yeah, and you can just hang this on your walls and that way things aren’t echoing. And

Ashley:
So me and Carrot could try those out. Do you want to sponsor us

Aaron:
A thousand percent? Yeah, I’ll get the rookie logo on a piece of flannel or something. We’ll send that your way. But yeah, I love making them and I love what they do for a room, and they can include just a ton of different designs. And I’m not set up shop or anything yet, but that is a direction I want to go. And it costs me, I want to say about 50, 60 bucks a panel. So I think the turnaround aspect on that as a side hustle is a lot of possibilities.

Garrett:
No tariffs involved either. I love it.

Aaron:
No.

Ashley:
Well, Aaron, thank you so much for joining us today on Real Estate Rookie. Can you let everyone know where they can reach out to you and find out more information?

Aaron:
We already mentioned the BP Daily Hustle, but if you would like to be a guest on there, or even if you’d like to just ask a question or what have you, you can go to biggerpockets.com/hustle, fill out the form, and we get that we are getting in different forms every week as the show goes on. It’s very new and it’s first stages, so it’s very exciting. So please share your hustle with us. We’d love to have you on the show.

Garrett:
Please tell me your theme music is Do the Hustle. I tried

Aaron:
So hard, but they wouldn’t let us have it. Copyright wouldn’t work,

Ashley:
Garrett. That should be your side hustles. You should do like a bootleg version and record it and send it to Aaron.

Garrett:
We’ll plot it out, Aaron. Don’t worry.

Ashley:
Well, Garrett, thank you so much for co-hosting today. Always a pleasure. Can you let everyone know where they can find you?

Garrett:
You can find me at Bigger stays on YouTube, which is our STR specific channel for BiggerPockets. And you can check out my weekly Bigger Stays newsletter that comes out every Wednesday through BiggerPockets as well.

Ashley:
And lastly, I’m Ashley. Thank you guys so much for joining us today. We hope you enjoyed this episode. Please make sure to leave us an honest rating and review on your favorite podcast platform and make sure you are subscribed. We’ll see you guys on the next episode.