Home sweet 4-plex

The financial freedom discussion was important background for this topic, which falls under the reducing expenses side of achieving financial freedom.

For those of you that don't know me personally (and how "frugal" I can be), you may find this interesting. My wife and I were recently looking for new digs in our new hometown of McPherson, KS.

Now McPherson is very interesting. Although it is a small town in Kansas (population of about 14,000, not including livestock), it has a great, stable industrial base which keeps the average wages among the highest in Kansas. As a result, home prices are almost as high as those in Kansas City (for those of you on a coast, that may seem low, but for those of you from rural Kansas, you know that seems high).

So we looked for houses on some acreage (like the one we currently have outside of Kansas City) and found we would have to pay just as much for houses that were about 80 years older.

Instead of buying what we considered to be an overpriced house on acreage, we instead decided to buy a 1920s house that had been converted into four 1-bedroom/1-bath units. And further reinforcing that this was God's plan for us was the fact that two of the four units were occupied, leaving the two larger bottom units open for us!

The way it worked out, we got a 100% loan on the property from a local bank. We ended up getting cash back at closing (we got the renter's deposits, pro-rated taxes, etc - I need to go back and look how we pulled that off - I didn't expect it), and the two renters will ending up paying about as much as the mortgage payment (we have some repairs to do, and we are going to roll that into the mortgage, so I don't know the final amount yet).

Now we do have to pay some common utilities and all of the taxes and insurance for the property, but overall, we will be living in 1400-1500 square feet of space - 2 bedrooms, 2 baths, for very little money.

It is also in the middle of McPherson, so we can walk or ride our bikes most places in town that we need to go (except in bad weather). Very importantly these days that will minimize our gasoline usage.

Just one more step towards financial freedom!