This week Craig Curelop and Zeona McIntyre are joined by Chris Gomes, a mechanical engineer by day who learned about house hacking from us (!) The FI Team by night. We were super impressed with how quickly Chris succeeded with his very first house-hack — rocking it luxury style with his own private unit no less — by keeping a can-do attitude, putting a lot of time into learning so he could do it right, and trusting the process even when the next step seemed impossible!
Give a listen to learn from his creativity AND mistakes for yet another great model for how anyone can build a life toward financial independence — even with the W2 and fresh out of grad school!
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Listen to the podcast here
From Grad School & W2 To House Hacking Success With Chris Gomes
We’ve got an awesome episode here with Chris Gomes. He was a client of the FI Team. I didn’t work with him directly. He worked with Nick and they got themselves a great deal. He’s going to go in-depth about it. He made a pretty cool decision about ending a fourteen-month lease to instead go ahead and house hack early because he saw the financial gain in it. I love that mentality and his gung-ho approach.
He’s a can-do guy. He always finds a way to make it happen for himself so I do love the way that he randomly came up with a private money lender at the last minute to cover his gap and his down payment. He’s making it happen. He’s an inspiration.
He’s a first-timer too. This is his first deal so it’s relatable. If Chris can do it at this stage of the game, anyone can do it. He wasn’t given anything here. This is a great episode. Let’s bring him on.
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Welcome to the show, Chris. How are you doing?
I’m good. How are we all?
Doing good. We’re excited to get to talk to you. We went through this deal together but it’s fun to dig deep into it and see what your emotions are.
I’m looking forward to diving in.
How did you hear about financial independence? Where did you get started? How did this all come to be for you?
It’s a pretty traditional route for me. I grew up in North Alabama. It was typical growing up, middle class, family, public school and all that stuff. Everyone goes to college for 3 to 4 years and works until you’re 65 and that’s about it. That was the plan for the longest amount of time. Honestly, I can’t remember what year it was but one of my buddies recommended a book called Rich Dad Poor Dad that some of you might have heard of. I dug into that one and it changed my entire mindset. As I was going off to college, I read it and didn’t think about it much more.
As I was wrapping up college, I got a degree in Mechanical Engineering and was going to go work at a space company after school. That book started coming back into my mind and I read it once more. I did go to grad school so I was still pretty dead set on that engineering job but all through grad school, I kept thinking more about investing.
I listened to a lot of BiggerPockets. I started networking with some guys and also reached out to a few other friends from undergrad that were also interested in the financial independence world. We started collaborating. I did a lot of learning back then and when I got out of school, I hit the ground running and I was able to close my first deal a couple of months out of grad school.
Congrats.
If you have no capital or experience, it's challenging to break into real estate without house hacking. Share on XWhen did you graduate from grad school?
It was a seamless transition all the way from high school. I graduated high school in 2013, went straight into an undergrad at Mississippi State University that year. I got out in 2018 and went to Auburn University where I did a Master’s in Mechanical Engineering there. I graduated there this past May of 2020.
You didn’t waste any time getting into your first property. You got Rich Dad Poor Dad, that’s been in the back of your head. It’s like the elephant in the room or the thorn in your side that keeps telling you to go one way, even though you’re going the other way. You finally were able to start investing because it’s hard to invest in college because you don’t have a job and you have to maybe ask your parents for a mortgage or whatever. Once you get your first job, you’re then able to qualify for the house. Tell us what happened after you graduated.
I graduated and got my dream engineering job here in Denver. I moved across the country, me and my girlfriend. She’s now my fiancé. I don’t know if I told you about that but we got engaged. We both came out here one summer and we signed a month lease on an apartment where it was the most amount of rent I’d ever paid. I’m from Alabama, the high rent there is about $500 a month.
We came out here and signed a fourteen-month lease for $1,400 a month and it was a smaller apartment. It was the cost of living out here and we were okay with it. We were thinking, “Let’s do this for a year, learn the area and we’ll buy a house next year. We’ll do a house hack. We’ll start getting into real estate next year after we’ve learned Denver for about a year.” That was the plan and we’re sticking to it.
About two months after moving here to Denver, I reached out to you, Craig on social media because I had heard your BiggerPockets episode. I forget which episode it was. It was one of the past 50 or so. I met up with you for lunch and told you about my plan, which at the time, wasn’t even house hacking. I was more looking into trying to do some house flips and some BRRRR deals while I was still renting an apartment.
You showed me the light and helped me understand the ROI you can get from house hacking and how that is a good first step into building an entire portfolio. It’s eliminating the cost of living from rent and a mortgage. During that meeting we had, I left thinking, “Let’s tag up a year from now and we’ll see where we’re at.”
As soon as I went home, I got that bug. I started looking at houses online and started trying to ask myself, “How can I get this done with only a few thousand in the bank and a few months of work?” I got aggressive about it. I started looking at a lot of houses and I got in touch with a good lender, Mike Stone, here in Denver. From there on, it caught fire and we were able to close the deal a couple of months after that first meeting. I can get into a little bit of how we got out of that lease as well. That was a challenge.
It’s always that people who are like, “We’ll do it in a year or something,” and this thing happens. Two weeks later, “We’re closing on our first house.” I love that excitement. I was thinking about why everybody wants to do the BRRRR strategy. I have people call me all the time that are brand new newbies right off the bat and I know that the BRRRR sounds good but it’s so much more advanced than people realize. There are many steps involved. I’m glad that Craig showed you the light there.
BRRRR is in an expensive market is quite the challenge. The house you’re going to buy is going to be probably $300,000 at the absolute minimum. Mr. Chris Gomes, who has never done a single deal at this time, walks into a hard money lender’s job and they’re going to laugh you out of the room if you want anything less than 12% and 5 points. You’re going to be 60,000 or $70,000 into the deal just from financing. Not only that but you’ve got to buy the property and you’ve got to find rehabbers to rehab it at a costly rate. On top of all those costs, you need to add at least 25% to the property value. You’ve got to get that property up to $400,000 after all of those expenses. It’s next to impossible to do in an expensive market.
When someone comes in and asks me to do a BRRRR strategy in Denver, I usually know. I’m like, “You probably haven’t done enough research on this. Let me educate you.” If you still want to do it, okay but you hear people on BiggerPockets BRRRR-ing and all that stuff. In every single one of them, they’re BRRRR-ing in Alabama, Fayetteville, Arkansas or these cheap markets and rent.
It’s important to educate people. It’s so much competition if you do find a run-down house, there are 50 investor teams that you’re going to have to compete with. They all have way more money and everything so you’re not even going to get it at a face value price.
You both are right about how it’s challenging to break in especially without having all that capital in the bank and no experience. The goal for me still is to do a lot of several deals a year BRRRR-ing, flipping, sub-to or whatever. Doing that house hack first freed up almost 40% to 50% of my W-2 income, which I’m able to save now as reserves for these deals and I have that on my credit. They see that I’ve done a deal before. It gives me a little bit more pedigree for when I do a flip or a BRRRR and these lenders know that I’ve at least been around the industry for a little while.
With house hacking, it’s like real estate investing training wheels. People have jumped right into it but if you’re 22, 23, 24 years old or you don’t have a whole lot of money, it makes so much sense to do that as your first one. You’ll start accruing a team. If something’s going to break, you’re going to need a call plumber, an electrician or all these things. You’re going to start gathering team members together and those guys will help you do your dream BRRRRs at some point. This whole thing is like a train, it takes a while to get going but once it gets going, it’s hard to stop.
Tell us about your first deal here. You seem to have signed a fourteen-month lease and I know you’ve already purchased the house. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about your thoughts as to why you broke that lease? Did you have to pay any fees to break the lease? What were the consequences? What was your decision?
This was a pretty complicated problem to solve. We were locked into this fourteen-month lease. We liked the apartment. We would have been completely happy living there but we knew we wanted to get started on this journey now. I had to sit down and figure out what my options were. I had the option of buying myself out of the lease, which I believe was two months’ rent and no security deposit back so that’s three months’ rent. It’s a lot of money. That was about $4,000 that I would have had to fork over to start house hacking immediately instead of the next year. I would have done it if I had to because as we all know I would have made that back probably in about two months of house hacking.
I was trying to figure out a better solution. On the same weekend that I closed on this house and that we were moving out of the apartment, I was able to line up a younger couple who they’re trying to find their first apartment. They’re able to take over our lease on the same day we closed so there was no overlap at all. I’m able to transition all of the utilities and everything into their name on the same day. It took a lot of coordination and we’re blessed that that happened so we didn’t have to spend the extra money. We marketed the apartment on Facebook, got those guys in there, we left and it worked out great.
You did that during the closing process. When you went under contract you started to look for someone.
As soon as I went under contract on this house, I started listing my apartment for sublease or a lease takeover. I got a lot of interest. It was a good area so it was easy for me to find someone to take it over. Finding someone first of all who’s interested and finding someone interested to move in on the exact day that we needed them was no small task so we’re thankful that we’re able to find those people.
House hacking cash flow doesn't have to be your main form of cash flow. It just gives you no cost of living. Share on XThat’s a little bit of foreshadowing for folks as to how you were able to also fill your place. When did you go into contract now? Can you give us a timeline here?
We closed on August 28th, 2020. The closing process was almost exactly a month so we must have gotten under contract at the beginning of August 2020 or the end of July 2020.
How was the closing process? Was that normal? Did anything happen?
I don’t know what normal is. That’s my first time but now I know what normal is. After I left the initial meeting with you, Craig, I started looking furiously online for houses. For my budget, I got pre-approved for $450,000 max so we’re looking at houses. You can find some pretty good house hacks here in Denver for $450,000. We found one that was listed. We found it about an hour after it went on the market. I sent it to you and I said, “What do you think?” You gave me the thumbs-up on it. I don’t remember what the scheduled conflict was but we weren’t able to tour it that day. Maybe something was going on.
My fiancé and I drove to the house. We weren’t able to go inside. We drove around the house around the neighborhood. We said that we’re going to offer it. We offered sight unseen about an hour after it went on the market for the asking price. We got accepted that day, went under contract. At that point, I had to figure out where to get the money because even though I had it under contract, I only had about $3,000 to $4,000 in the bank coming out of grad school. Cash to close is $21,000. I had to figure out how to scrounge up about $20,000 in 30 days.
It was daunting at the beginning but ended up being able to secure a small private loan from a family member and give them a return that’s favorable for me. Honestly, it’s a 5% return over about two years on that cash to close. I essentially ended up with a zero-down house hack where I’m paying a mortgage and a private lending payment every month. Still, the rental income takes both of those out. I apologize, I forgot what the original question was. I started going into disclosure.
I don’t even remember what the original question was.
Everybody’s paying attention. Chris, what I get about you is that you are a magical manifester. All these things that you’ve been bringing up are these magical happenstances. It’s like, “I had to pull out $20,000 in 30 days.” Not a lot of people could do that. Do you have some of the things that are in the background? Do you visualize how you want things to happen? Have you been a big believer in this happening for you? I’m surprised at how you’re able to pull all the pieces together.
I am a planner but I thrive in situations where there’s a little bit of pressure. I do enjoy those situations. For this deal, there was significant pressure. I could have done without a little bit of it but for the most part, it was fun and it’s worth going through it. I like to analyze what I see around me. For this deal, it was running the numbers and putting it under contract. Once I’m there, it’s figuring out from there. Brandon Turner coined the phrase on BiggerPockets, “Jumping out of their plane without building a parachute on the way down.” I took that approach a little bit on this one and worked out with house hacking being a safer investment on this. It was something that I was okay with doing.
How did you fill it? Was that the next step? We were going to talk about that.
I went through the closing process and closed on it in late August 2020. From then on, the only thing I cared about was filling it with tenants before my first mortgage payment was due because I knew if I didn’t do that, that’s one mortgage payment I’ll never see again. After I closed it was a month until my first mortgage payment. I marketed heavily on Facebook, Roomster, Roommates.com, word of mouth. I didn’t do any flyers or anything like that. No Craigslist.
For about two weeks, every day after work, I spent probably 3 to 4 hours on the phone with people doing interviews, researching around property software and getting the place cleaned. I had to furnish the whole place, upstairs, aside from the bedrooms. There’s a lot of work for about two weeks but now it’s paying off dividends and I couldn’t be happier. We did rent by the room strategy. The house is an up-down duplex, West of the city in between the mountains and downtown.
We live in the 2-bedroom, 1-bath mother-in-law walkout basement, we rent the upstairs 3-bedroom, 1-bath rent by the room strategy. The upstairs is absolutely turnkey so it was renovated before we bought it. The downstairs is still up to date but probably maybe we’ll do a little bit of sweat equity here while we live here. We got to fill in 2.5 weeks. Each of those tenants is paying about $800 a month for their room plus utilities.
What’s your mortgage payment?
Everything, principal interest tax and insurance are $2,300.
You’re making $100 a month and you have your own living space, that’s awesome. That’s better than most. What you’re doing is a luxury house hack where you have your entire space yourself. Usually, with these luxury-type house hacks you have an entire place to yourself, you’re not breaking. You’re usually paying a little bit so it’s awesome that you were able to get there for free.
There's definitely more realism than meets the eye when you start talking about deals. Share on XOne thing I admire about you, Chris, is you got that place filled in two weeks. That is almost unheard of. People are having trouble filling rooms and they come to me and I try to help them. Honestly, you get out what you put into it. There is nothing more important in this world than filling these rooms. It’s the mindset you have to have.
If your health is okay, your family’s okay and all those good things. Come with that mindset that your number one priority is getting these rooms filled in. If you come with it at that approach like you did, you can get the rooms filled quickly. Props to you there. You somehow made it off and you have yet to pay $1 towards your mortgage.
Since I did technically do a zero-down house hack or a $2,000 or $3,000 that I had to spend out of my pocket for a little bit $800 towards closing after my private loan. I spent about $1,500 to $2,000 on the furnishings for the upstairs but pretty much it was a zero-down house hack. You also have to include the private loan payment that I sent over to my family member who gave me that every month.
I am coming out-of-pocket a little bit. That’s about a $700 payment towards that family member every month for the next two years. I’m making $100 over the mortgage from rental income. I’m coming out-of-pocket about $600 every month, which is less than half of what I was paying in my apartment. When I move out, this will cashflow well over the mortgage and the private loan payment so I’m not worried about that too much.
That sounds like a great situation. I was going to ask you if you’ve had any issues with your rooms because I manage a bunch of student rentals and we do rent by the room strategy. Sometimes, I’m dealing with a nightmare of roommates not liking each other. How did you strategize that? It sounds like you did extensive interviews.
I marketed mostly on Facebook. It was about 90% of the leads I got. I started off with a phone call. I read Craig’s book that gives a good explanation of how to do pre-screening for those of you who are considering the house hack. I did a lot of interviews. You can gauge from the first five minutes of talking to someone if they’re serious. If they weren’t, I would be polite with them on the phone and we’d end the conversation. I’d send them information but most of the time within your back. The stats were about 1 out of every 100 I got to sign a lease. I interviewed about 300 people or at least messaged them on Facebook. It’s quite that much but it was definitely over 200 that I interviewed.
I got a lot of people coming in that I liked and I was thinking, “This is going to be a great tenant.” They seemed interested, I seemed interested but it didn’t work out and that bummed me out a little bit. We ended up filling the room with 2 guys and 1 girl in the house upstairs. Each had its own rooms. They’re all between the ages of 22 and 24. They’re all young professionals here in Denver and they’re awesome. The girl even made us brownies a couple of times after she moved in. They’re nice people. We haven’t had any tenant squabbles. Their rooms are, as far as I know, in good condition. I don’t go up there.
I’ve gone up there a few times for a few maintenance issues. The sink had to be fixed one time. I called a plumber. It was definitely worth the money to spend on that because I probably would have spent about two weeks and I don’t know how much money I would spend on materials done. I’m not the handiest person so I’m more of an outsource guy when it comes to fixing houses. We’ve had a few things that we had to repair but I save about 15% of the rental income for those repairs and haven’t had to dig into my pockets too bad for those yet.
A quick recap on this first property, Chris. You bought this thing at the end of August 2020 for $450,000. Your first mortgage payment is going to be October 1st, 2020 and it’s $2,300 or so. You move into the bottom with your girlfriend, now fiancé. You fill those top three rooms in three weeks. That’s $2,400. You’re only putting $3,000 into this deal because you’ve got a private loan from a family member to whom you’re paying interest to so it does tap into your cashflow.
You still realize and see the bigger picture that the $700 a month or $20,000 you borrowed from whoever it was your family member is going to pay off tremendously probably in appreciation. Never mind that you’re saving $800 a month in rent and all the tax benefits you’re going to get. When you put all that together, you still made a phenomenal decision. Also, you’re getting your first rental property and you’re going to systematically do this year over year until you’ve got a lot of money, I’m sure.
Is that what you want to do, Craig? Is that what Chris wants to do?
No comment.
That’s a mutual goal. We’re going to do another one. We’ve got plans already for what we’re going to do with this house. We’re planning on buying one in September 2021 as soon as we can. We’re going to keep this two-one basement. Hopefully, it’s an Airbnb. That’s allowed where we live. I’m pretty sure that’s still okay. If not, we’ll do long-term tenants but we’re going to try the Airbnb route and see how lucrative that can be here in Denver. We’re going to hopefully find a similar house to this one where we can have our living space. Maybe do it 2 or 3 more times. At that point, I’m sure that Jordan’s going to want her own place. I could probably do it forever though.
Make sure that Airbnb is legal. I know Denver is pretty strict when it’s not your primary residence. Make sure you confirm that. You’re going to get sick of house hacking. I’m on my fourth one going on number five. I’ll probably do another one but you get to a point where you’re like, “I want to live alone.” That doesn’t mean you can’t house hack. You’re living alone. Keep doing the same thing.
Where are you headed in the future, Chris? How many do you see yourself doing? Do you have an idea of what cashflow number you want to see? What’s the big plan?
That future goal wraps into my future for my career as well. I studied for about seven years to do this job that I’m doing at my engineering company, which I do love. The whole reason I’m doing this is to not have to work until 65. That’s the whole idea of financial independence. We’re going to do a few more house hacks, maybe 1 or 2 more. My goal is to expand my investment portfolio through buy-and-hold properties out of state.
We’re going to be in Denver for the long haul and we plan to be here for a long time. I’m starting to invest a little bit in Huntsville, my hometown, doing some flips and some buy and hold. We have one under contract. It’s tough working 40 hours a week and also saving time to learn about real estate and network with people but we struck a pretty good balance.
As far as house hacking cashflow, all I want out of it is no cost of living here in Denver, which is attainable. It doesn’t have to be my main source of cashflow because I feel I want that to be expanded amongst other buy and hold properties and other avenues of real estate so I’ll be happy with at least covering all of my payments here in Denver. Hopefully, anything extra on top of that is cherry on top.
I have two unrelated questions for you, Chris. The first one is you went to undergraduate and you went to grad school. What is your student loan situation looking like?
For undergrad, I racked up about $40,000 of student loans, which it’s about the median. It could be worse or it could be better. I didn’t have to pay for those at all. It helped me as far as my credit goes. I deferred those for two years in grad school. I’m not exactly sure on the details but because my credit came out stellar, they’ve been recorded as $0 payments for about two years. My credit was awesome when I was able to buy my house hack. The student loan has helped along with that. Not that I recommend going into student debt to build your credit but it coincidentally worked out.
Make sure you know exactly what's wrong with the house so that if you have to do repairs, you're at least prepared for it. Share on XI went to grad school for free. I got a research assistantship in the major that I was studying. I got a small salary to go to grad school to pay for everything else. I didn’t accrue any more debt so I came out with about $42,000 in debt and still not paying anything on those because of COVID. I’m going to start paying probably minimum as soon as I have to and directing as much of my own money as I can into these investment avenues. I’d like to pay them off probably after I flipped a few houses to hopefully save some of that money and pay it off in a lump sum rather than over the next 40 years.
You’ll knock that out pretty quickly especially as you start picking up rental properties. We made this deal on this first house. It sounds like unicorns, rainbows and all that. You put a lot of work into it but in the end, it seemed it worked out well for you. What are some of the struggles you’ve gone through? What are some of the emotional roller coasters you’ve gone through? What are some of the struggles you may be going through for it?
There’s more realism than meets the eye when you start talking about deals. There have been some struggles. Honestly, I would count ourselves pretty lucky. We haven’t had to deal with anything too crazy. We’ve probably spent $1,000 or $2,000 on stuff that’s broken. I do have one key lesson that I will never make this mistake again. I counted it as a lesson learned.
As I was going through the closing process, I was checking the boxes, nonchalant, sign this, sign that. I skimmed through things but pretty much I would understand that’s the part of closing. I didn’t look too much into the inspection that was returned to me. I hired an inspector before I bought the house. It had some normal stuff on it. The house was built in the ‘50s so it’s going to have some problems with it. Nothing too major though but I looked at it and generated a few things that I saw on the inspection objection list and sent it back to the seller. They agreed to everything and that was it.
Come closing time, less than half of what I asked for was fixed and it was a little bit of a miscommunication between me and the seller. I ended up losing a little bit of money there. I don’t blame anyone in particular for that. If anyone is to blame, it’s me for not reading more into what I was sending over to them. What I learned was I needed to read that report because the biggest problem I’ve had so far has been, believe it or not, squirrels in the attic. We’ve got a few extra tenants up there and are not paying rent.
Where do they sneak in from?
It’s on the report. I went back and checked. It’s my fault for not catching it but there were a few holes in the soffit underneath the roof. That’s where they’re getting in. I’ve patched up as much as I could. It’s been a battle for about 1.5 months. I’ve tried everything. I started off mercifully, “I’ll catch and release.” At this point, I want to get to by any means possible because they’ve been living up there making noise. I’m at the point where I’m about to probably spend some serious money getting out of there, which is fine. It’s turning into a sitcom moment of me battling the squirrels upstairs.
My biggest lesson learned is making sure you know exactly what’s wrong with the house. If and when you do have to repair things, you’re at least prepared for it. We’ve been thankful that nothing serious has happened. A couple of grand here and there and we’re still on top because of the house hack so we’re good.
I’ve had squirrel problems. I had squirrels in my attic too. For the longest time, it was a B&B and sometimes people complain about stuff. I’m like, “Let’s see if 2 or 3 people tell me something.” I waited a while. It doesn’t have to be that expensive. I don’t know what you’re considering expensive. We hired a pest control company and they charged us $65 a squirrel and we ended up getting five. After that, it was done and they patched it. You might want to go the pest control route. Squirrels are pretty destructive. They’ll start eating all the insulation in there. You want to get them out. Plus, they’re pooping up there.
I’ve been feeding them for free for 1.5 months. They’re smart. Every time I bait something, they take the bait and the traps are sitting there. They’re smarter than me, that’s for sure. I’ve got to figure it out.
That’s the issue when you’re buying a house. I find that a lot of people when they first buy their house, especially one that maybe hasn’t been lived in a while, there’s a lot of things that go wrong over the course of the first 3 or 4 months. Once those get all fixed up and taken care of, you’re pretty much good to go for a while. I’ve seen that in almost every house that I purchase too. There’s a leak under the sink or this electric thing is weird or whatever. It’s weird things that happen. If there’s nothing else, we can move on to the last part of the show but are there any other spurts of wisdom you’d like to share with the audience?
That’s about it. I recommend house hacking for everyone here in Denver and all over the country.
With that being said, let’s get into The Final Four.
Chris, what are you reading?
I’m reading Jay Scott’s The Book on Flipping Houses. It’s a BiggerPockets book. I’m about halfway through it. A lot of it is information I’ve gathered by trying to flip houses and getting started. It’s got some awesome nuggets in there for anyone interested in getting into the house flipping business. It’s funny with me and books, I like to put together a list over a month, buy twenty books and go through them one at a time.
Sometimes I’ll start reading four at a time. It’ll take me a long time to get through all of them but that one’s the one I’m committing to. Also, this one isn’t a read but I purchased The Intention Journal that Brandon Turner published for BiggerPockets as well. That is awesome. It’s getting me to use my time so much more efficiently. I recommend it. It’s worth the money. The Book on Flipping Houses is a read and Intention Journal.
What is the best piece of advice you’ve ever received?
I’ve received some awesome advice throughout my life from a lot of key people. The best one is pretty simple but it’s powerful. Growing up, my dad always told me, “Make the best decision you can at the time with the information you have. No one can see into the future and you can’t sit idle and not make decisions. Look at what you know. Look at what you can assume to be true and make the best decision you can.”
That directly applied to this house hack. I didn’t know if I was going to be able to fill it in 2.5 weeks. I didn’t know if I was going to be getting $20,000 as a loan but I was pretty sure it could happen and I was willing to take the risk. Make the best decision you can at the time with the information you have. That’s my advice.
We didn’t touch upon this. What is your why for getting into real estate investing and working towards financial independence? What are you hoping to achieve in your life?
It’s pretty cliché, honestly. Create generational wealth for my family. We didn’t go without but we were by no means above where we live. We’re content. We’re thankful for what we had. Both my dad and mom worked extremely hard to provide for our family. We had an awesome time growing up but I want to start now laying the groundwork for when I’m his age or older or even a little bit younger.
I want to have the availability to go on cool vacations with my family and donate to causes I care about without having to be tied down to that 40-hour week lifestyle and create an incredible life for my family and the next future generations of my family. I’m sure that’s what a lot of people say but it’s my motivation to get up every morning, read books, analyze deals and make phone calls to people I’ve never talked to before. It’s a burning fire at this point and it’s a train that’s not going to stop anytime soon.
What’s interesting about generational wealth, if you give somebody money, you’re taking away this fire. There’s so much that’s happening on your end of building this empire. I get having cool vacations but there is something about being able to work. I don’t know if I fully believe in generational wealth to the point of being rich and hanging out. That’s my own two cents.
I would agree with that. Chris, I promise you I won’t tell you what to do with your money. We’ll help you make it.
You’re doing a good job for sure.
Which body part do you wish you could detach and why?
Probably my head so I could play pranks on people or something. I put my head on the counter and spy on people.
Spy on people and no one will notice your head on the counter for sure.
It would be my head so I could still be in meetings and stuff but go do other stuff. I have never been asked that before. It’s a good one.
That’s the idea. I want to catch you off guard. Zeona is cringing over there. Where can people find out more about you? Where can they contact you if you so desire?
I’m on Instagram and Facebook. My Instagram handle is @CAGomes572. You can also email me, Chris.Gomes572@Gmail.com. That’s pretty much the easiest way to get in touch with me.
Thank you so much for coming to the show. Thanks for sharing your story. You’re still in the beginning but it certainly was exciting getting that loan together and putting all the pieces together to get the thing done. You’ve done a hell of a job so make sure you keep that fire up on properties number 2 and 3 because it’s easy to get confident and lazy.
Thank you so much for having me. We’ll be doing a lot of business in the future. I have no doubt about that. Thank you, both.
I’m looking forward to it, Chris. We’ll see you.
Thanks.
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That was Chris Gomes. Z, what did you think of that episode?
It’s so relatable. I always love when it’s not this crazy thing that people don’t think they can achieve. It’s nice to see how he moved to a new town, learned it and got a place there. I also love that he gave us a little teaser about it but then he’s taking his investment skills back to where he’s from and he’s going to blow it up in Huntsville. It’s nice that he got such a good boost from working with you, Craig but now he’s taking over the world.
House hacking is such a good foundational place to start and that’s exactly what he did. I love the action that he took. It seems like his only priority was to get those rooms filled in the first couple of weeks and he did. He’s got three great tenants and hard work pays off. He’s someone that makes it happen. He wasn’t given anything super relatable. Anyone can do exactly what he did. There were some struggles too. He talks about the ups but there were also some downs. The realistic approach to this whole thing is what I like as well.
I love that it’s a luxury house hack because often we show people only the rent by room strategy and honestly, that’s not for everybody. The luxury house hack is so doable and he’s still pretty much living for free so it’s awesome.
Luxury house hacks are one of the things that pretty much anyone can do at any time. I hope you guys all liked the episode. If you like the show, please give us a like, a review and a rating. We try to look at all of those. All of the feedback helps us give you all a better product. Feedback is welcome. Z, if there’s nothing else you have to say we can get out of here.
I’m good.
Go enjoy Hawaii.
Thank you.
We will see you all later.
Important Links
- Chris Gomes
- Rich Dad Poor Dad
- Roomster
- Roommates.com
- The Book on Flipping Houses
- The Intention Journal
- Facebook – Chris Gomes
- Chris.Gomes572@Gmail.com
About Chris Gomes
A former engineer in the space industry, Chris helped found KPG in December 2020. He is the current acting CEO and uses his planning and project management skills to grow KPG and form the vision for the company. In his spare time, he enjoys playing with his dogs, hanging with his wife and hiking in the Rockies.
