How to Reduce Your Primary Housing Expenses to Nearly $0/mo

1. Mortgage payment (principal + interest)

2. Property Taxes

3. Homeowners Insurance

#2 & #3 are often rolled into your mortgage payment and escrowed for you until they are due.

Chances are these 3 together are anywhere from $1,000-$2,000/mo, depending on where you live and how much of a loan you took out to buy your house.

Can you imagine if that $1k-2k/mo payment was reduced to nearly $0/mo? Life-changing, right? I’m sure you can think of some other things you’d like to do with that money each month.

The solution: House Hacking

In other words, use/hack your house to earn the extra income needed to pay for your primary housing expenses. Or move to a house that can generate the extra income.

There are many creative ways to do this. Here are a some examples:

• Convert the storage building in your backyard to habitable space and rent it on Airbnb.

• Build a tiny home in your backyard and use Zillow to lease it full-time to a college student.

• Buy a duplex/triplex/quadriplex and live in one unit while renting out the other units

• Rent out an extra bedroom to a friend

Our family has done this in 2 different ways:

1. Converted a storage area behind our garage to an efficiency and rented it on Airbnb (we averaged $1,200/mo which easily covered all of our housing expenses) -- you can see the picture of this one at the top of the blog

2. Converted a detached single-car garage behind our house to habitable space to rent out to professors & visitors to a nearby college (just beginning but should also average at least $1,200/mo)

*Disclaimer: Always check the codes in your area to see what types of rentals are allowed.

Because we want to keep our primary housing expenses near $0 every month, anytime we move we make sure there’s an easy way to rent something out on our property to cover our housing costs.

You can too!