Introduction to me

It should come as no surprise to the folks reading this first blog-post of mine, that I have created this blog to share something that transformed my life. I sincerely believe, if I were to elevate even a single reader's experience through my blog-post, the goal of me sharing my life' experience would have been achieved.

Today I am in my thirties, coming close to ending my 2018 peacefully and basking in the love of my family, I am trying to look back at one of the busiest and tumultuous year in my life, one where I had multiple changes, positives and negatives.

This is the year when we purchased our next home in a City that is em-battling oil price crisis, changed jobs and took on a challenging role in a private company, rented out my home - previously my principal residence, and moved my family, pets and belongings - a decision that was not easy. Additionally, it is also the first time when I had to move for good to a City relatively far from my close friends whom I call my family, leaving behind the many personalities that I closely associate myself with, ones that have shaped me well.

Now, let me jump right into the meat of it. As of today, between me and my partner, we currently have rental properties that generate roughly 30% of our household income. This year, my calculations predict our household income to be roughly close to $300,000.00.

To tell you the truth, I am an average standard income generating individual, and so is my partner. However, it has taken years of smart planning, a little bit of frugality that I call sensible and pragmatic consumerism, a bit of luck, market forces, risk taking and a lot of long-term worldly view of things to accumulate our income properties. I strongly believe, many of us, average individuals lack the ability to plan for tomorrow, 1 year from now, a 5 year plan, let alone 25 year plan. In the short term of things, we see mortgage payments as liabilities and forego the concept of asset accumulation. What we fail to see is that there are very few ways in which we can beat the market forces without working for it full-time - real-estate is one of them.

I started when I was 21, in 2010 as a recent graduate from University, and a job offer from a private company paying - my goal was to buy my first home roughly priced at 1/2mil - a detached in one of the priciest suburbs which was then viewed by my peers as a debt black-hole. I know what you are thinking right now, why would anyone want to buy a detached at 1/2mil as their first purchase. Call it luck or will, I always wanted a nice home in a good neighborhood and with the interest rates hanging at its lowest, I decided to move forward with the purchase. Granted for the first few years, I was struggling to make my ends meet, and my house was owning me, and not so much the other way around. However, it wasn't a difficult task to notice that the market was going up by the hour and the price of a home was looking tangentially towards the roof.

Few year later, my next door neighbor listed their house for $1.4mil. This newly found equity in the house gave me leverage to invest in a downtown condominium. A market that was dictated by much different forces than the ones for the detached suburban homes. Finding a tenant was not difficult at all and the rental income broke even with the mortgage and maintenance for the condo, something that investors envy these days.

My partner was lucky enough to have already invested into the real-estate market in the same City. As our relationship grew stronger, we devised a plan to consolidate living space and rent out the property that was no longer required. We now had two rental properties and a principal residence.

With the looming career change for me, we decided, if we were to make good income out of our principal resident home, it would prudent to convert our basement into a legal secondary dwelling unit. It took a year of planning. red-tape and construction, and our home was officially a legal two-dwelling unit. Roughly around this time, I received a job offer that I couldn't refuse from another Canadian City. This essentially meant, I would have the opportunity to move to a more affordable City, one where I can continue to further invest in real-estate.

Once I settled in my new job, we started to hear a lot about mortgage qualification tightening criteria and regulations from Bank of Canada. Given my current liabilities, we feared, this would only make things worse for us from an affordability perspective and therefore, we acted quickly. We placed a bid on a dream home that would cost us roughly $2 mil in my previous City. Little did we know, three months later, we would be the successful owners of our 4th property. Its been a year since we lived in our new home and since then, we were successfully able to rent all our properties in our previous City that we called home for 10 years.

As the year is coming to an end, it is important that we self-evaluate the achievements and mistakes, and that we take the time to look back and see where we stretched an equivalent of a dollar as thin as practically possible, at the same time where we went over board. Not only does it seem as if our investments paid off quite well, but it has certainly reinforced our retirement plans. I say that because, all our mortgages with the current interest rates are projected to wind down somewhere between 20 and 25 years. When I turn 55; 25 years from now, we will be looking forward to a retirement rental income with no mortgages to pay for all our properties.

We, as average family members have thousand things to worry about. But for us, retirement is not one of them. This long-term planning alleviates one of the most common issues that is plaguing middle-class families these day - the freedom to retire at 55.

We are now awaiting the right time to grow our family.