How I’m Finding Profitable Properties in 2025 (Shotgun Method)

Ashley:
With today’s challenging market, many investors are wondering if cashflow opportunities are still out there. Our guest today has not only built an impressive portfolio from scratch, but continues to find creative cashflow strategies even in 2025.

Tony:
Now, whether you’re working a W2 job or investing full-time, our conversation today will give you practical insights on how to adapt and thrive in the current real estate landscape.

Ashley:
This is the Real Estate Rookie podcast, and I am Ashley Kehr.

Tony:
And I’m Tony j Robinson. And to give me a big warm welcome to none other than Henry Washington. Henry, what’s up brother?

Henry:
What’s up guys? How are you?

Ashley:
Good. Thanks so much for coming on today. You’ve built an impressive real estate portfolio when you actually started this, when you had a full-time job in the tech industry. So can you walk us through your journey from employee to investor?

Henry:
Yeah, yeah. I was designing software and doing data analytics, and one thing I realized was I made good money, but I was bad with money and I was okay being bad with money, but I got married and my wife was not okay with me being bad with money. And so I had to figure out a way my solve at the time was figure out a way to make more money and then I can still be bad with money, but I’ll have more. So that’s what got me started looking into real estate. And then as I started to research about how to get going, investing in real estate, a lot of the information I was reading was telling me I had to have some money saved up and I started to save 10% of our income. And so the journey of real estate started to help me learn that I needed to be better with money.
And that’s, so that was what led me down the path to wanting to do it. The next thing I did was I just surrounded myself with other investors. I didn’t know how to do it. And the industry is like the space is crowded with people who want to teach you how to do this. Now, it wasn’t like that seven, eight years ago. There was some people out there for sure, but online education wasn’t as widely accepted. And so I just wanted to learn from people who were doing it in my backyard. So I started going to every real estate meetup I could find, and strategically I would place myself in front and center of the room so that I could meet all the people who were confident in actively doing deals so that I could just be annoying enough that they would want to help me.
So I would just really and say that differently. I would just try to sit by people who were doing deals and figure out ways I could try to help them and if I figured if I could help them with something that they would just naturally want to help me. So that was one of the ways that I got into the space and learned. And the next thing I did was I’m just a really big believer in you get what you give in this world. If you want something, you got to give it. And so I just started telling everybody I was an investor because if I didn’t believe I was going to be one, who else was going to believe me? So all of those things kind of help position me to be ready for my first deal when it came.

Tony:
And as we think about that first deal, Henry, because you said that you weren’t great with money when you started, you started saving money up. So how did you actually fund that first deal?

Henry:
Well, I didn’t fund it. The way we funded the first deal was, I mean, frankly, we used my wife’s 401k, but we were married, so it’s like our 401k.

Ashley:
Are you in a 50 50 state where if you would’ve gotten divorced, you would’ve got half of it anyways or

Henry:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, it would’ve been fine. So yeah, no, we borrowed against my wife’s 401k, so which turned out to be really good at the time because it was 2017, so we bought a property that cash flowed, we were able to raise it to market rents, and we were getting enough cashflow that it even covered us paying back the payments for the 401k loan. So essentially our tenants were paying off our loan. We used to borrow the money.

Ashley:
Henry, can you kind of describe that process of borrowing from your 401k? What is that actually and how do you do it?

Henry:
Yeah, so 4 0 1 ks, right, retirement savings that you have through an employer, typically there’s two ways to get access to that. Well, three ways to get access to that money. One is retire at the appropriate age and then get access to it. Two is you can cash it out before retirement age and that involves you paying lots of penalties and fees and taxes, so it’s very expensive to cash it out. You lose a lot of about half your money is going to go to penalties and fees. And then the third way is you can borrow against it. So since it is your money, most 401k plans will allow you to borrow your own money. So you can borrow percentage of it, I believe it’s like you can borrow up to 75% or something like that. Don’t quote me on that, but you can’t borrow all of it. And then you have to start paying that money back with interest. So you get a payment monthly payment that you’re paying that money back with interest, but it’s your money. So that interest goes back into your 401k account and typically your employer will deduct the payments from your paycheck, so it’ll come out of the money that you’re making from the job.
And so we elected to do that plan. It gave us access to the cash fairly quickly, and because we knew we were buying a deal that was going to yield a better return than the interest it was costing us to borrow the money. And so essentially it was like arbitrage.

Tony:
I love the idea of leveraging the 4 0 1 KI leveraged, and Mindy and I have talked about this from the money podcast about just leveraging your stock portfolio to do that as well. You’ve got enough, you can do it that way also, but do you feel that that’s a strategy that maybe still makes sense today? Say someone does have a good amount of money in their 401k as we go into 2025 and beyond, is the 401k loan still viable?

Ashley:
Well, not after the stock market just tanked.

Henry:
Well, you just won’t have as much to borrow. You just won’t have as much to borrow.

Tony:
That actually brings a really good point because I know for the stock loans that I had, you have to keep a certain margin between the balance of the loan and the value of your portfolio. And if the stock market ever fell to a certain point, you would actually call a portion of your loan due to make sure that you stay within that threshold. Do you know if it’s the same with the 401k loan if the stock market tanks?

Henry:
I do not know if it’s the same with the 401k loan, but it wouldn’t surprise me if that’s the case because like I said, they’re only giving you access to a portion of the money. And so that portion may shift depending on how well the stocks are not doing. But I am not an expert on that. Is it a viable strategy? Yeah, it’s a viable strategy. I think viable and achievable are two different things. And so what I would caution people is the only reason this worked for me is because I bought a really good deal. I bought a house that was valued at $175,000 for $115,000 or 116, something like that. So I knew that if worst case scenario happened, I could literally do nothing, stick that house back on the market as it sat and sell it for one 40 through 1 55. I could sell it under retail value in its current condition and make a profit.
I had a viable exit strategy if something weren’t to work out. If I’d have got into this and realized I didn’t want to be a landlord, there’s a million things that can go wrong. And so where I think this strategy is a problem for people is if you go and buy something that is not a good deal and you end up over leveraged because if that asset is not producing enough income for you to make your payments back, you are now having to pay to feed your property and then having to still make payments on your 401k loan because you still have to pay that money back whether you go buy a house with it or not. And so if you take that money, go buy a bad deal, and now you’re having to feed your deal, you still got to make that payment. So the goal is can you do it? Yes, absolutely. You can do it, Tony, but you got to be sure you’re buying a good deal. You need a deal that has at least two exits so that if you’re playing A doesn’t work, you can execute on the plan B and save yourself.

Tony:
Amber, you actually wrote the book or one of the books on finding and funding deals for BiggerPockets. So for any of our rookies, you want to check that out, we’ll link to it in the description of this video. But Henry, you are an expert real estate investor and we definitely want to get your insights on finding cash flowing deals today like in 2025. It is a little bit of a challenging market and we want to know whether or not investors should maybe be pivoting. So we want to get your insights on that, but we’ll do that right after afterward from today’s show sponsors. All right, let’s get back to our show with Henry. So Henry going into 2025, what is your strategy when it comes to investing in real estate and have you had to pivot at all due to the current marketing conditions like interest rate and rising property prices

Henry:
Overall strategy? I have not had to pivot. So I tell people I’m a boring real estate investor. I don’t do any of the crazy cool fun stuff. People want to buy apartment buildings on creative finance or they want, I buy single families and small, I fix ’em up. I either rent ’em out or I sell ’em. That’s it. And I buy it traditionally with either a small local bank or some sort of hard money or private money, and then I’ll refinance them into 30 year fixed DSCR loans. This is real estate investing 1 0 1 I’m doing, I don’t got no fancy boutique hotels like Tony, I’m just boring. I’m boring, boring real estate, but that’s cool. That’s fine for me, my lane. And so has that changed or am I pivoting? No, I’m not pivoting in the overall strategy. What is changing is the underwriting and your underwriting always has to change.
The market is ever shifting, right? Markets are cyclical. And so we as investors have to figure out what it is in our underwriting that needs to change to suit the new market. So yes, interest rates are air quotes, higher America is seen higher interest rates before, so I don’t think they’re terrible. A lot of people think they are. We were just used to between two and 5%, and so now we see a six or between a six and an eight and people are freaking out. I don’t think it’s that bad. We do have this whirlwind of factors that we’ve never seen before in real estate. We’ve never had a time when we had all time high interest rates in our lifetime, all time high prices in our lifetime. And also we’re starting to get all time high taxes and insurance. It’s all rising. And so that group of factors hasn’t all really hit us in the face at the same time.
And so the challenge that happens is, yeah, I can still buy properties at cashflow. I’m just going to have to buy them with more margin. I’m going to have to buy them for a lower price point. And so the problem isn’t can I find deals that make sense? I can find deals that make sense. The problem is I’ve got to make a whole lot more offers to get to the same amount of deals that I’m used to doing because now I’m offering less than I typically would, and not every investor is their underwriting. So I’m competing with people who are probably willing to pay more, which means I get my offers accepted less frequently, so the volume has gone up. So to answer, the long-winded answer to your question is I haven’t changed much. I underwrite a whole lot more conservatively. I’m planning on buying it cheap enough that the higher interest rates don’t bother me and the higher expenses don’t bother me, and I can hold that property longer if I’m going to flip it because things aren’t just flying off the shelf in the first 30 days anymore.

Ashley:
So Henry, when you’re purchasing a deal, are you right away saying, this is going to be a rental, this is going to be a flip, or are you underwriting for both options?

Henry:
I underwrite for both. I typically underwrite everything as a flip because I have the biggest margins as a flip, and so I know if it works as a flip, most of the time in my market it’ll work as a rental. That’s not going to be the same thing in every market. Like in Seattle, you can’t underwrite it as a flip and hope it works as a rental. The margins are too different. But here, median home price is like 300 and something thousand for starter homes are going for two 50. So retail value. So if I can underwrite something as a flip nine times out of 10, I can make it a rental if I need to. So I underwrite everything, flip.

Ashley:
What are your expected margins? Just to kind of give an example of you, Henry, a successful investor right now, what is the profit you are looking to make on a flip to make it worthwhile and what is the cashflow you’re looking for on a rental property too?

Henry:
Okay, I’m going to answer this question a couple of ways. So I’ll give you an example of a deal I have under contract right now that we’re closing on Friday, so you can get some real numbers and then I’ll tell you typically how I want to do for a flip, and then we’ll talk about the rentals. So the deal I have under contract right now, I’ve got a house under contract. I’m paying 90,000 for it, it’s going to need 40 to 50 in a renovation, and we’ll sell that one for two 50.

Ashley:
Wow.

Henry:
So decent numbers.
What I typically look for when I’m going to flip a house in a profit is I want to make what I put into it, I want my risk and reward to be fairly equal. So if I’m going to do a deal where I got to spend a hundred thousand dollars on a renovation, I want to make somewhere between 80 and 110, 120 on the sale. If I do a deal where I’m going to put 30 in it, I’m okay making 30 on the deal, right? Typically that’s going to be a cosmetic in and out super fast. So I’m okay making around 30, but that’s kind of my baseline when I’m underwriting a deal. Now, obviously those margins, I’m okay shifting them depending on where it is. If it’s a property in a great area and I know it’s going to sell super fast and I’m super confident in it, I may be willing to make less profit because I’m confident and it’s like a basic layout. We know the layout’s going to sell, but if it’s a property in a tough part of town or it’s got a weird layout, I’m going to adjust that to where I want my profit to be higher for me, taking on more risk.

Ashley:
Henry, I really like how you answered that question because a lot of people would’ve answered that I look for 50 to 80,000 per deal without giving any context as to how much capital you’re putting into the deal. You actually set it in a way that made it comparable apples to apples so someone could understand how much of your own risk, how much capital you’re putting into the deal for it to actually be worth it instead of just saying, oh, on average I’m looking to make a hundred thousand dollars, and there could be somebody who’s dumping 200,000 into a property and they’re making a hundred. Or it could be somebody who’s, oh, I don’t put any money in. I get 100% financing and I’m making a hundred thousand. So I really like how you phrased that for us there. Now what about the rental side?

Henry:
On the rental side? So we have to caveat, I know this is rookie podcast, but I am not a rookie, so what I’m willing to make on a rental is a whole lot different now than it was when I was a rookie. So I’ll caveat that and then I’ll talk about what I think a rookie should look for. What I am looking for is if I can find a house or small multifamily in an appreciating market or neighborhood that I’m walking into equity, meaning let’s say ARV on that property is $350,000 and I’m buying it for 175, right? 200. I’m walking into equity on day one, and that property is net positive cashflow, conservatively underwritten, meaning everybody is like, oh, the property is going to cashflow. I’m paying 200,000. I’m going to get 2200 in rent, and it’s got positive cashflow. No, right? I’m talking if I am conservatively underwriting, meaning my rents are going to cover my mortgage principal and interest, my taxes, my insurance, my vacancy, because I’m going to always account for at least 5% vacancy plus 10% CapEx and 5%

Ashley:
Repairs and maintenance,

Henry:
Yes, repairs and maintenance. If I got 30% on the expenses conservatively and it’s net positive cashflow after that, then to me that’s a buy all day long. I don’t care if that net cashflow is $10 or $200 or $300 per door because at this point, the value of walking into equity, the ability to have a property that I’m going to be able to do a cost segregation and offset my taxes because I do flip houses, and that’s heavy short-term capital gains that I need to offset. The other three ways that real estate pays me is far more important to me than the two, three, $400 of monthly cashflow that it produces every month. That is the least important part of how that real estate pays me right now. As long as that property is in an appreciating neighborhood is in good shape or will be in good shape after I renovate, because like I said, the cashflow is the least important. Now, if you are brand new, that’s not something you can do. You’re not there yet. I have a portfolio of other cashflowing assets that are doing great, but you should underwrite your deals for significant cashflow. If that property was going to make two, $300 a door, then I’d say that person should probably buy that property. If that property was going to break even then that rookie should not buy that property,

Ashley:
Especially if you don’t have hefty reserves in place and depending what your reasoning for investing in real estate is too. So if you want to accumulate units to quit your day job, you’re going to have to buy a lot of units to make up that 5,000, 10,000 whenever you’re making a month if you’re only getting that little cashflow.

Henry:
I have two brand new houses, new construction houses that I bought in 2024. Those houses, they retail for 2 25 each. I paid one 70 for each of them. They’re brand new, so no maintenance is needed. I walked into equity on day one. They rent for probably, it just depends on the tenant at the time, but I’d probably say I either break even or I have to feed that thing 50 to a hundred dollars a month considering the hold I have on the expenses. I would buy that again all day long because technically my maintenance is pushed out. I still budget for it as if I’m paying it every month, but technically it’s pushed out probably five to 10 years brand new construction. But I was able to do a cost segregation study. Those properties probably saved me $25,000 each of my taxes, plus I walked into 50 grand of equity on each one, which I can now go get a line of credit on and use it to buy more property. Plus the tenants are paying down the debt on that property. And so that’s an example of a deal that maybe doesn’t net me the ideal cashflow every month, but still makes sense for me to buy at this stage in my investing career.

Ashley:
So let me ask you, because we’ve been hearing about this more and more purchasing new development for rental properties, did you get any incentives from the builder upfront, like a lower interest rate or great lending terms or seller credits? We’ve had a couple of guests on that talked about when you go new development that there’s motivation from the builders to give you these incentives.

Henry:
Yeah, no, I didn’t really get anything. We did get some seller credits, but that was just, we were legally finagling the money so that I didn’t have to bring money to closing. But this situation was this builder so said differently. I guess the answer is yes, because the builder was selling me the properties for one 70 even though they were worth 2 20, 2 25 because he had much bigger developments in the works that were sucking up all of his cash. And because interest rates were rising, he was having a hard time getting those done. And so he was dumping knees to grab some of that cash to go take care of what he needed to take care of in his other developments. And so I was able to walk into a really good deal because the developer had bigger fish to fry because of some of the things that you talked about.
And I think it’s a great point because yeah, if you think about right now and in our current political climate, tariffs are going to drive the cost of materials up, meaning it’s going to be more expensive for developers to build new homes and make a profit. And if deportation causes problems with labor and they’re having to take longer to fix or to finish these properties, they may be willing to take some concessions to get some of these properties sold or pre-sold and off the books. And so it wouldn’t hurt to go talking to a developer and seeing if you could negotiate yourself a deal.

Ashley:
Okay, I am going to do it.

Tony:
I think that raises my next question, Henry, is was this opportunity just listed on Zillow and it was like, Hey, here are two new developments for sale. I guess the bigger question is, where are you going today to find these good deals that you’re adding to your portfolio?

Henry:
That particular deal came through a local real estate agent. The builder had them listed at retail, but I had basically told the agent, Hey, this is what I would take for ’em if you know anybody that can get it done quick. And so he just reached out to me. But how I’m finding my deals right now is still the same way I was finding my deals before. We’re going direct to seller either via direct mail or my website. And what I found most recently in the past probably 90 days, my website has been generating more leads than before than it has on average before. And so people are looking to get out of properties right now if that’s what that’s telling me. And so direct to seller I think is still a great way to get ahold of some of these properties for the simple fact that if you’re going to go on the market or if you’re going to go through a wholesaler and buy off market, you’ve got a middleman to pay. And remember we just talked about you need to get these things and underwrite at lower prices to protect yourself. And when you’re paying a middleman, you’re taking away some of that money that needs to go in your pocket for you to be buying a safe investment. So going direct to seller is going to save you some money and hopefully allow you to find those deals.

Tony:
What strategies are you seeing to really drive traffic back to that website? Is it just word of mouth? Are you doing PPC? What strategies are you leveraging to actually get people onto that website and filling out that form?

Henry:
Yeah, we do pay-per-click for sure. And so we’ve got a company that builds the ads and manages the ad campaigns for us, not cheap. It is not cheap to do this by the folks. This is not how I would start unless you have a healthy budget for your marketing.

Tony:
And that’s what I was going to ask because you could go the route of a wholesaler and obviously they’re going to make their assignment fees and whatever deal they send to you. And there are some investors who were like, man, I hate paying assignment fees because it’s like, man, I could have got that deal myself, but I think people, but you didn’t understand exactly. They don’t understand the work that goes into actually doing that. So if you were starting today, Henry from scratch, what do you feel would be your most effective way to get an off market deal?

Henry:
Okay, if I was starting today from scratch and I needed to find a deal, the first thing I would be doing is A making sure everybody that could hear me or see me or see anything that I do know that I was buying, where I was buying and what I was buying. So I’d be putting a post on Facebook every week. I’d probably put a post that says, Hey, I’m Henry. I’m looking to buy houses in X, Y, Z markets. I’ll pay you a $500 finder’s fee if I buy something you send me. That’s going to help you generate your leads for your business, not just leads for deals, but whenever I do this, contractors are reaching out to me saying, Hey, I don’t have a house you can buy, but if you get something, I’d like to bid it. It’ll help you get contacts for private money.
Maybe somebody you like know or trust is going to see that you’re doing this and say, Hey, well, I got some money I’d like to put to work. Let me know what your next deal looks like, where I get leads for everything in my business just by putting those posts out there. So I would schedule a post once a week on social media, on Facebook and LinkedIn specifically. Those are typically where you’re going to get the most traction with this kind of a post. And then I would start collecting names and email addresses of contacts for contractors, lenders, and all the leads that come through. That’s step one. Step two is I would go and I would go to every real estate meetup that I could, and I’d specifically be looking for new wholesalers that seem hungry, not the person that’s like, yeah, I think I want to get into wholesaling.
I heard you can make some quick, no, you’re looking for the person that’s new, but sounds very serious about it because when you’re a new wholesaler, it’s hard. You’re competing against other people. But what wholesalers have is a budget for marketing because if you’ve got a wholesaler that’s got a budget for marketing and they’re going to market for deals and they know they’re going to have to assign those deals, well, I would be trying to figure out, all right, well, how do I go partner with this person to have him send me or him or her send me those leads when they get them so I can take them down and maybe I can talk them into partnering with me on them, or maybe I can talk them into giving me some exclusivity on those leads, getting first look at those leads. So I’d find out all those new wholesalers, if you’re a new wholesaler, you’re trying to make money, and if you can find somebody who is going to be a buyer for you out of the gate to help you offload those first few deals, that’s super helpful and powerful for them.
So I’d be connecting with as many new wholesalers as I could and taking ’em to lunch and just trying to build that relationship so that when they get those leads, you can get a look at those leads and try to take down a deal that way. And the next thing I would be doing is pulling a list of every single property that’s within your buy box. So if you know you want to buy single family homes, less than four bedrooms, less than 2000 square feet in certain parts of town, whatever your buy box is, your criteria is I would narrow down that criteria I’d get on realtor.com and Zillow and build that list criteria. And then I’d be looking for anything that’s in that list criteria that’s been on the market for 30 days over the average days on market in your market. So you need to do some research.
If the average days on market and your market is 60 days, you need to be looking at anything that’s 90 days or older. If the average days on marketing your market is 30 days, you need to be looking at anything that’s 60 days or older. And I would literally make an offer on every single house that comes up in that list, search at 50% of what they’re listed at. I wouldn’t walk them, I wouldn’t do anything other than say, what’s 50% of RV or what’s 50% of their list price? I’m making an offer at that because if you get somebody that responds and says, a counter offer, well now you can go look at that property and you can make an actual real offer. But what you’re doing in that space is you’re playing the numbers. You’re hoping that somebody because of this economic climate needs to sell and is struggling to because it’s been listed for too long and maybe they’re willing to play ball. And so that’s just like a shotgun approach you can take to make offers on several deals on the MLS right now. So that’s three things I would do if I was brand new that don’t cost me anything but time.

Tony:
I’m so glad I asked that question because those are all just fantastic strategies, and especially on the last one of just offering whether it’s 50% in Henry’s market or 70% in Tony’s market, or 65% in Ashley’s market, just make the offer because I still think that we’re in a really kind of interesting point in the real estate cycle where I think sellers are finally starting to understand they don’t have the same leverage they had before. And it really does feel like it’s shifted towards a buyer’s market, and you can offer significantly below asking price and actually get a response. Maybe they counter and maybe you end up getting the deal. So I think once interest rates fall to a certain point, whatever that point is, we don’t know is it 6%? It’s at five point a half percent, but they’re going to fall once they get to a certain point that’s going to unlock a lot of buyer demand.
And when that happens, it’s also going to unlock a lot of competition for investors like us. So if you can get in now where rates have come down, right? They’re not at like 8%, right? We’re like in the sixes right now and the high sixes, but if we can act while there’s less buyers, it’ll be easier for us to have those kinds of conversations with sellers. So dude, I love that advice, man. Hey, we have to take our final ad break, but we’ll be right back after this. Now while we’re gone, make sure you are subscribed to the Real Estate Rookie YouTube channel. If you haven’t done that yet, head over to youtube.com/at realestate rookie. We’ll be right back afterward from Marshall Sponsors,

Ashley:
Welcome back from our short break. So Henry, last week, Tony and I put up an Instagram story on at BiggerPockets rookie. So if you’re not following us there, go check it out. And we asked people if they had any questions specifically for you. So we received a lot of questions, but there was one that continuously people were asking multiple times, and this question was how do you get your significant other onboard? And at the beginning of the episode, you kind of teed this up perfectly. You mentioned that you used your wife’s 401k, so I’m assuming she was on board with your idea from the start, but can you maybe give some advice to our rookie listeners?

Henry:
Absolutely. How do you get your spouse on board? So this is really advice for anyone with anything. We have to talk to people in the what’s in it for them, because that’s how people listen. They listen to hear Why is this or how is this important to me? And so I teach people this all the time. If you’re a new investor and you’re dealing with a real estate agent and you want that agent to work with you or work for you, or maybe submit an offer that seems like they might not want to submit whatever it is that you need that agent to do, what do agents want? Agents want their commission and they want to get it hopefully as fast as possible. So speak to them in the what’s in it for them. Frame your conversation around how your offer or whatever it is, is going to help them get to their commission and get to their commission faster.
If you’re working with a wholesaler, same thing. Frame your conversation around what you’re doing or what you’re asking or what you’re providing is going to help them get to their assignment fee faster. Speak to people in the what’s in it for them. So when it comes to your spouse, nobody knows your spouse. Hopefully nobody knows your spouse better than you do. So speak to your spouse and the what’s in it for them. Some people’s spouses are going to be very focused on the financial security aspect. So how can you frame the conversation around why you’re doing this to show them how it’s going to bring more financial security to them? Some people’s spouses, like my spouse, she already understood real estate investing. She had uncles and grandparents that had been in the game before.
What’s in it for my spouse at the time? Were a couple of things. One was we were trying to get to a home that we could be comfortable in. We had bought a starter home and we knew we needed to upgrade a couple of times before we were going to get to the home where we could spend a significant amount of our life in it. And so I said, the way I spoke to the What’s in it for her was I said, okay, look, I know we’re trying to get from here to our essential air quotes, dream Home. I said, there’s two ways we can get there. We can get there by continuing to work hard, get raises and promotions until we can upgrade out of this house into our next house and then continue to work hard and get raises and promotions until we can get there.
And I estimate it’s probably going to take us somewhere between five to seven years on that path for us to get to be able to afford the kind of home that we’re looking for. I said, or we can go this real estate investment route and we can try to house hack where we can buy a property, live in one of the units, rent the other unit out, and then that savings and what we would be paying in rent or a mortgage. We were paying about 1200 bucks a month in a mortgage, and we were able to get down to where we were only having to come out of pocket about $200 a month by house hacking. And so we were taking that additional thousand dollars a month that we were used to paying, and instead of just spending it, we put it in a savings account for 12 months.
So 12 months is $12,000. You live there two years as $24,000. So we live there two years, saved up 24 grand. We ended up renting out that property that we were living in, and we used that 24 grand as part of our down payment for the house that we could afford to live in. And then as we rented out that other unit, it was able to then start producing cashflow, which allowed us to pay part of our mortgage at our new property. And so essentially what I pitched to my wife was, I can get us here in seven years on raises and promotions, or I can get us here in two years and have a property that pays for a portion of our mortgage once we get there and we won’t have to save for a down payment. She said, well, that sounds like the plan we should do.
So speaking in the what’s in it for her helped her to get more on board. So the first thing I’d say is, what’s in it for them, your spouse? And then paint the picture of what you’re doing and how it helps meet the needs of the person that you’re talking to. And if you can’t find anything that meets the needs of the person that you’re talking to, maybe this isn’t something you should be doing. Maybe you need to be doing something else. And the other thing is, oftentimes people, spouses, they feel like their spouse doesn’t trust them on this, and maybe that is or isn’t true, but I would argue that if they don’t trust you and you’re in a normal loving relationship, there’s probably something that you’ve done that’s brought on that feelings of doubt. And so I would take a long hard look at you and make sure that when you say something to your spouse, when you make a promise to your spouse outside of you being a real estate investor, that you follow up on that, don’t say, I’m going to go to the gym five times a week and then give up on it every second.
Don’t say, I’m going to do something for the kids and then not do it. Don’t say, I am going to take on this responsibility, take out the trash cleanup and then not follow up on it. Sometimes it’s the little things that we do that lead to the doubt creeping in over time. And then when it’s time for us to go take action on some of these bid things, we’ve kind of crushed that trust over time, and sometimes we need to rebuild that.

Ashley:
Yeah, that’s such a great point as to figuring out if there is a doubt, what that doubt is, and kind of trying to rework that so it’s solving that problem as to why they have those doubts. So we had a ton of other questions, but we’re really short on time. But there was one specific question that I actually thought, this is actually interesting. And it was somebody from James Danner’s team that submitted this question, and the question was, Henry looks great and purple curious as to why he chose purple as his significant color.

Henry:
We would’ve never bought that first deal without her letting us borrow that money from the 401k. I would’ve never started investing in real estate had she not picked me off the ground and kicked me in my butt and told me to go do what I said I was going to do. A story I don’t tell very frequently is not long before I actually was going to get started. I had run into somebody who I looked up to and was telling him about all this. He was an investor as well, and he basically said, Hey, man, you don’t have any money. You don’t need to be in this business without some money, so you need to not do this and go figure out how you can make some real money and then get into real estate investing. And I kind of took that to heart and I was discouraged and I was like, no, he’s probably right. And so she kind of was like, no, you said you’re going to do this. Go do it. You made a plan. Go execute on your plan. So without her, I wouldn’t be here at all. So when it was time to pick a logo and a business, the only thing I could think about was something that relates to her. Well,

Tony:
That is a damn good story.

Ashley:
It was Amanda that asked that question, and I think she’s going to love the answer even more than she expected to after hearing that. Well, Henry, thank you so much for joining us today on The Real Estate Rookie Podcast. Where can people find out more information about you?

Henry:
Yep. Best place to reach me is at Henry Washington on Instagram at the Henry Washington on Instagram, or you can check me [email protected].

Ashley:
I’m Ashley, and he’s Tony. Thank you so much for joining us today. We’ll be back with another episode of Real Estate Brickie.