I am new to ERE, still in the middle of the book and have been reading the forums these past two weeks for a few minutes a day.
I am a father of two year old triplets (two boys and a girl). They have many therapeutic needs right now as they were born under two pounds and have significant development issues to this point.
My wife is a stay at home mother and NOT at all on board with ERE yet, though I plan to continue talking her through this as I implement the steps for my own finances. I honestly feel like a human ATM at times and my children have every comfort imaginable.
I am 38, and actually had my primary home paid off at age 36. And I had six other rental units that, while still not paid off, were bringing in rents of approximately $2500 a month. There are offsetting expenses with that, which I will detail.
When we had the triplets, we felt our 750 square foot home was too small, and a rash of break-ins/ vandals on the street had us thinking that the neighborhood was going down hill plus you need to wear Kevlar if you want to attend public school there, so last October, we upgraded to a much bigger home in a suburb of Buffalo, NY (lots of snow so forget bicycles six months of the year) and we have a $129,500 mortgage leftover as of this writing. I pay the mortgage bi-weekly, $575 which includes Taxes and Homeowners Insurance.
To be clear, my wife will NOT let us move back to the old house, nor any other house for that matter. She is convinced this is the house she wants to live in till the kids move out in a couple of decades. It was not a good conversation when I broached ERE topic with her.
We are currently renting the home we vacated and splitting the rental income with her brother. That brings total monthly rental income of all the properties to $2700.
I am sure if I can show a significant amount of increased savings, decreased debt to zero, and show a passive income stream that takes care of everything and more, she’ll be on board. I just think that I have more of an uphill battle than some of the other stories I read here.
To each their own…we must walk our own path from where we stand now, not from where someone else is standing.
I do NOT want to continue to be a landlord…at least not for all of the properties. On this, my wife and I agree. Too much worry in addition to the kids and everything else going on. In my ERE scenario, I will keep one of the four rental homes, and I have the specific one in mind which currently generates just under a thousand a month in rents. Yearly taxes on that property are around $1400 ($117 a month), Hazard Insurance is $750/year ($62.50 a month) and quarterly bills for Water and Garbage average out to about $65 a month.
I used to be able to ride my bike to work when I was in the other home, which was only 5 miles away from work. I now live 22 miles from work, and there are no buses that will take me to work, nor no one I know of that I could car pool with.
On the plus side, I work from home two days per week and there is every indication that this may increase to three or more days per week by 2013 as the bank I work for goes into serious restructure and consolidation and is encouraging more work from home, where it makes sense. I am a compliance office who makes just under 100k a year. If I add rental income in, then I make about 132k. I broached selling my long ago paid off car, and she did not like that idea at all, even in an ERE scenario. She’s convinced that it would be logistically nightmarish when the triplets get to school age and get involved with separate activities.
My wife just started a bootstrap small business this month, selling women’s purses or organizational stuff like giant bags. She already has four parties booked this month and expects to bring in a three hundred a month conservatively.
I blog and write books as my passion. All my previous books are off the market now, but I will have one on Meditation coming out in October, self-published on my blog, likely as an ebook only to start. Given how new this present blog is (Aug 31) I’d be lucky to make a hundred dollars a month for the next several months at that. The goal is that this income helps move the snowball in the right direction for ERE and that it may end up I continue to do this to supplement ERE if I still enjoy it several years from now.
This entry is getting very long so I will break it here...
