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Do you watch all of those renovation shows on HGTV? Flip or Flop, Fixer Upper, Property Brothers, Good Bones, House Hunters Renovation – a seemingly endless list of programming. And in every one of them, a massive renovation budget. $17,000 custom cabinets. $6,800 quartzite countertops. $13,000 appliance packages. Total budgets start to eclipse $200,000 even when they’re only doing a few rooms of the house. That’s just ridiculously too much for most people I know. Since the shows are meant to be entertainment, not instructional, that’s fine. But it’s not difficult to make a renovation look great for hundreds of thousands of dollars. It’s aRead More →

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2019 brought some radical changes for me. I quit my job in May with the intention of taking a sabbatical, spending more time with family, and thinking about what I might want to do next and where I’d want to be. That entailed saying goodbye to a lot of friends in California and a work/social life I was pretty comfortable with, putting my things in storage, and driving cross-country back to NY. (I talk about it in my video blog update.) I’ve had some amazing family time in the last six months and great visits to friends I hadn’t seen in ages, so that partRead More →

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For years now I’ve been interested in real estate investing. I like the idea of a tangible asset that I can see and touch, versus stocks and ETFs. I enjoy working on homes and can put sweat equity into it “someday” if I choose. And as the saying goes, they aren’t making any more land (random volcanos and wealthy Middle Eastern countries aside)… So I set myself a summer job task of learning about it, talking to people who’ve done it, and making the leap myself. Research mode: You’re reading what? I went to my local library and browsed through several books on the topic.Read More →