As real estate investors, the difference between those who sink and swim is the ability to weather turbulent times, financially, that is. The thing about real estate is, if you can withstand a long enough time horizon, you will win. You just have to stay in it through the ups and the downs. One of the ways we do this is we budget for unexpected expenses, many call it “capital expenditures”. It’s difficult to obtain a mortgage from a bank without reserves in your bank account, for this very reason. The bank wants you to have money put aside in case something goes wrong, in other words, budgeting for the unexpected. 

I bring this up because lately we’ve been discussing the hurdles of saving money for a home in today’s economic times. As a result of record high prices for almost everything, many people struggle to save money. Sometimes life just beats the crap out of you, your car breaks down, something in your house breaks, you get an unexpected bill. It all seems to pile on at once sometimes. Then you’re constantly caught playing catch up with bills or racking up credit card debt. It’s an exhausting cycle. 

Circling back to my earlier point about how investors budget for the unexpected, I think that this concept would also be beneficial to the average person. If you had a small portion of your paycheck go into a bank account that you really don’t pay any attention to, when you’re hit with a surprise cost, you can then go into that account to pay for it and not even sweat it. I like to do it this way because you basically just set it and forget it. Better yet, you can set a minimum, for example $1000, and then once your account exceeds that amount, you can use the excess on whatever else you want. 

It takes a lot of forethought to navigate finances nowadays, but whatever avenues we can take to save a little bit of money will always serve well in the future. It also just reduces a lot of the stress that comes with life’s random surprises. Thanks for reading!