Sometimes things just don't work out ... having to wait

Sometimes things just don't work out.

In the Fall of 2014, my wife and I had started looking at houses.  We needed to move from a small house in the City of Rochester, to somewhere just outside the city limits.

As we discussed options, we came to agreement that we would try to rent our current home and not sell it.  We didn't have a lot of knowledge at the time regarding rental properties, but someone we knew said that it would be easy to do, so we decided to take a swing at it.  After what seemed to be months up for rent, we had no bites.  The math just didn't work at the time to keep it longer unoccupied, so we listed it for sale instead.

At the same time, one of the houses that we put in a purchase offer on had an in-law suite that had been rented for the previous few years.  For a few brief minutes, we might have jumped into the rental property game back in 2014 with two units, but it wasn't to be.

Both the house rental and the in-law suite rental fell through.  We didn't end up purchasing the new house that October, and as I already stated, and we eventually got rid of our permanent house at the time.

Four months later when we found our current home, we were tied to a much larger mortgage, the new home needed improvements, and we had a child that had full-time child care expenses.   We were tapped out.    You guessed it, my dreams of having a rental would have to be put on hold, but it didn't mean that I couldn't start to gather some basic facts.