Sacrifices to get into RE

[Chanté Owens]

Hopefully this is in the right section. Mods, feel free to move if it's not.

I've been reading on this site now for well over 8 months, and recently joined so I could communicate with some of these great minds.

This is something I've been thinking about recently, since it's close to the end of the year and as always, a time for reflection and planning for the new year.

I'm curious to know what are some sacrifices you've made in order to get into the RE game. While there are some who indicate you can get into this with little to no money, and a few who have deep pockets from family members/friends; it appears the vast majority have gotten into this and have been (some fairly and others wildly) successful by sheer virture of making personal/financial sacrifices and making it work.

Without getting too personal, I'd like to know what some of you have done in order to save money; raise money; sacrificed, etc, in order to really make a splash in this game.

I'll start. I left the insurance industry back in 2008, and have stepped back in at the latter part of this year, because, while I love my travel business and freelance writing that I do; it will not be able to take me (financially) to the place I'd like to be in the next 2-4 years. I know that in order to get money to purchase my first multifamily unit, I'll need some "skin in the game", ie, large down payment. Going back into the "Corporate" world, while painful in some ways, is definitely a means to an end. I've also completely changed my outlook on what's a "necessary" expenditure vs an "unnecessary" expenditure in efforts to rethink the outlay of money I spend, so I can save as much as possible...it's slow going.

I look forward to reading others stories of personal sacrifices.

[Brie Schmidt]

When my husband and I decided this was a path we wanted we moved into a cheap rental. We could have afforded more but used the money we saved to pay off all debt. We also created a modest budget and stuck by it. After we were debt free we started saving for a down payment for our first MF. We also both work corporate jobs that are soul sucking and we hate - but we understand that we need to do this so we can payoff our mortgages faster.

Even today we still stick to the original budget any any major purchases that would be considered indulging we ask ourselves "is it worth not retiring at 40?"