The Investor's Guide to Real Estate
- TT&W Team
- Nov 1
- 3 min read
It’s been a while since we published a blog post - having a toddler and infant has somewhat curtailed our international travels… Give it a few years and a little more self-reliance with the little ones, and we’ll be back on the road (albeit as a family of four with slightly different travel priorities).
In the meantime, we wanted to share some news that is definitely relevant to our travels, and we think is relevant to a lot of people’s ability to travel overseas for extended periods. Chipp (wearing his CPA / real estate developer hat) recently published a book, The Investor’s Guide to Real Estate Finance, Accounting & Tax: A Journey from First Homes to Multifamily Developments.
Real Estate Investing and Travel
Okay, how is this book related to travel? Good question! Years ago, when we first launched this site, we wanted to explain how the two of us were able to take a year off to travel the world. As the name suggests, there’s some work included with our travel. Essentially, we saw freelance/contract work as a way to pay the bills overseas. Staying in places where the dollar is strong, a little US dollar income lets you take advantage of some great lifestyle arbitrage (i.e. the US dollar going further than it does at home).
But, we were still relatively young at the time, with kids on the horizon, so neither of us was comfortable just putting our savings on hold. Enter real estate. Whether it’s one rental property or a dozen properties, having (well-managed) income-producing properties ensures that you continue building wealth, even if you’re just breaking even with your cash flow on the road. In other words, our contract/freelance income gave us cost-of-living cash for now, but our rental properties built wealth for later. Specifically, investment properties build long-term wealth in three primary ways:
Loan amortization: Every month you pay your mortgage, a portion of that payment reduces your loan balance. As you reduce the outstanding loan, you increase your equity - or ownership - in your property.
Property appreciation: It may happen in fits and starts, but as you hold a well-analyzed rental property over the long-term, it will increase in value. Historically, that increase in value has outpaced broader inflation. So, by simply holding a property, you build wealth.
Cash flow from rents: If you’ve done a proper cash-flow analysis on your rental, you’ll also have a little left over at the end of the day (i.e. once you’ve paid your debt and operating expenses). This “gravy” can - and did - supplement our freelance income on the road.
So yeah, you definitely don’t need rental properties to go live overseas. For our situation, though, having this backstop gave us the confidence to head out for a year, knowing that we hadn’t completely put our (pre-kid) savings on hold!
A (not The) Real Estate Journey
The book… Yep, this is a bit of a shameless plug, but Chipp wrote this to provide a concrete, executable roadmap for others to build wealth with real estate. We don’t care about real estate for real estate’s sake - but we definitely see it as a viable financial path to pursue the things we truly want to do (e.g. spend time with friends and family, travel, volunteer, write, etc.).
Here’s the path laid out in the book, with each chapter covering the finance, accounting, and tax considerations necessary to make that specific step in a hypothetical real estate journey happen. There are a million ways to successfully invest in real estate, and this is just one path - but it’s the path we can vouch for:
Chapter 1: You’re Tired of Renting - Buy a Home
Chapter 2: You Have a Spare Bedroom - Make Some Money Renting it Out
Chapter 3: You’re Moving - Convert Your Primary Residence into a Rental Property
Chapter 4: You Have Some Extra Cash - Buy a Rental Property
Chapter 5: You Want to Cash Out - Sell or Refinance a Rental Property
Chapter 6: You Want to Do This Full-time - Start a Real Estate Business
Chapter 7: You Want to Scale - Partner with Other Investors to Buy a Multifamily Property
Underwriting Appendix: You Want to Build - Develop a Ground-up, Multifamily Property
If interested in these real estate topics - or using real estate to help fund your travels - please check out Chipp’s book. Thanks in advance, and hopefully you find it insightful!
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