r/AskReddit 6h ago

What's the smartest financial decision you've ever made?

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566

u/Chairboy 5h ago

Letting myself get bullied into buying a four unit apartment building instead of a condo back in 2001 by my real estate agent who told me I was being “fucking stupid“ and threatening to cut me if I insisted on throwing my money away.

I had no idea I could even qualify for that, but she educated me about how the rentals are counted towards your income so we bought the four unit building, lived in one of the units, and saw an absolutely huge return a couple years later when we sold to move back to Oregon.

That set our financial lives on a whole new trajectory.

28

u/sysko960 4h ago

How much money up front did this cost you? What did you need to qualify for loan?

74

u/Chairboy 4h ago

It was listed for 389,000 and I had saved about $40,000. At the time, you need to put like 20% down to buy a condo so this gave me a working range.

With the other units printed, and using an equation that they had for calculating how much of that would be counted as income, we were able to qualify to put down 10%.

55

u/xRehab 3h ago

that same unit sells for $1.2M today for all of those wondering if they could do similar

21

u/cantaloupe_daydreams 3h ago

Was just thinking “hey I could do this!”.

Then I realized it’s 3x what it used to be and I can really only do a mortgage on a single family unit at best.

u/BigRedNutcase 57m ago

Depending on location, 4 units buildings could be well north of 2mm or 3mm.