I am a husband and a father of 4 (ages 15, 12, 8, & 7) who lives in Chicago and trying to survive this world just like anyone else. My wife and I are a couple who loves to spend as much time with each other and our kids as possible, whenever the opportunity presents itself, but I am sure like other families sometimes finding the time to be together is limited to our every present obligations. Those obligations might be our jobs, kids’ activities, other responsibilities and like anyone else, we have looked for other areas of trying to generate passive income and/or more than passive income. Moreover, this site is really to try and express myself and eventually get my wife to dabble in blogging as well to vent some frustrations and also provide some guidance and insight into some of the things we have done over the years to put us into a position where we do quite well for ourselves.
More personally, I am someone who loves sports, lifelong Cubs fan here, and I am constantly looking at sports sites and trying to keep up with the day to day on all things sports, not just baseball. I also enjoy the occasional leisure activities like mobile gaming and also your everyday social media browsing. What I mean when I say browsing is just going through sites like Facebook and finding anything that I find interesting to gain some “new” information to myself so I can help deliver that information to family and friends as well as colleagues. It is this same habit of mine that helped me find the possible opportunity of blogging as a way to vent some of concerns and give information to anyone who may be looking for it.
As I stated earlier, my wife and I do okay for ourselves. We have been able to purchase a 2 flat in the city of Chicago and a separate single family home. We are currently in the midst of a remodel that has been a grueling process that has tested our patience, but when the project is complete will add additional equity to the value of our home as well as being our forever home. We are currently in the process as well at looking at additional investment properties as a way to generate additional income as well. Another thing we do is reselling. We take items that we find on discount or promotions in our area and resell those products for more than we paid on sites like Ebay and Poshmark. While we do not quite call this a full fledged side business, it has helped us with a couple hundred dollars a month when we started rolling. We had to cut back a little due to the remodel as we do not have the space right now to really hold the inventory we need in order to amp up the business to higher proportions. The reason for that is we are currently staying in a 1 bedroom basement apartment that has added to the stress level of our home not being complete, but we are managing it. Just one day at a time we tell ourselves.
My wife and I may not be the most successful couple out there, we are examples of what hard work and dedication can do to better yourselves. For example, when I met my wife, I was terrible at money. When I say terrible, I mean just horrendously awful. I have a credit score of 580, a car that just got repossessed and no bank account balance at all. My wife, however, was excellent at managing the money she did have. She worked with me (bless her heart), took me for my faults and really just kept rilling into me the importance of being responsible with money. Money can be a tool if you let it, but I never understood the concept of that until I met my wife. I mean I received a high school education, but nowhere in high school is it taught when I was going the power of money, or even the concept of money. Unfortunately, I think this is something that is designed, but that is another post for another time. However, I think that with my mom being a single mother of 3 and doing whatever she had to do to support, including working nights and having 3 jobs, she didn’t have the time to really teach us about money. But luckily I met my wife and she was a Godsend. I still remember one night, we were sitting in her parents backyard, which was also a 2-flat (1 of 2 they own on miniscule salaries) and we were talking about our future goals. We both talked about how we wanted to retire early and I noticed that while we both wanted to retire early, she had a plan. I didn’t. That was a real eye-opener, that not only was I, at this moment, physically attracted to her, but I was also attracted to her mind as well. She was able to express in almost every detail how she wanted her life to go. It was still way to early to talk about marriage at this point, as we were only dating for maybe 4 month at the time, but I knew I wanted to “know” her more. She intrigued me intellectually.
With that being said, I also knew that I was nowhere near ready to really hold that early retirement idea with 100% seriousness because I knew in comparison to her, I wasn’t even close to even conceptualizing the idea. She already had it created. So after that conversation, I began to start learning more and more of what it meant to really save and save and save. However, I hadn’t put it into practice. When we decided to get married, we combined our finances. Well, technically, I joined her already having $10,000 saved and me having $0 to my name and a whole bunch of debt. Even with that, she still wanted to marry me because it was more about love than anything, faults and all. So we both began working at a telecommunications (part base pay, part commissions) company in 2006, and were set to be married in September of 2006. It was tough for me, because initially she basically controlled all of the money. It wasn’t so much that it was her controlling the money as it was me not really understanding the why behind. I wasn’t paying the bills, or handling the financial stuff, it was her. I just didn’t know how. But I kept learning and we kept saving. By the time we reached our 3 year anniversary, we had $100,000 saved in our bank account. It was time for our retirement goal to start panning out, so we bought a 2-flat. We got lucky as it was right after the recession, and properties were popping up left and right, but what wasn’t lucky was we put ourselves into position to be able to take advantage of lower market values and purchase our 2-flat. That 2-flat paid our mortgage as well as outing additional money into our pockets. With that extra money and our growing family, it was time to purchase another property, but this time a single family home for some privacy. So 3 years later, we bought a single family home, just 5 houses away from our 2-flat. We had 2 properties in a span of 6 years!!! We are off to a great start, we both thought.
Then reality hit us. Actually it hit me sooner than my wife, as we both realized we didn’t want to work in the telecommunications industry doing what we were doing for the rest of our careers. She went back to school full-time and had to quit her job, and I was already doing schooling online to gain some degrees to move up the corporate ladder where I am now. This loss of income was not as bad as a blow as one would think as we were already in an okay position, thankfully because the building provided enough financial flexibility to pay both mortgages and then some. However, it was at this point, that I really had to take on the financial burden as well as the family burden. You see, her school required her to leave the house at 5 in the morning to study and get home at 11-12 at night because of more studying. This created a situation where I did not have a choice. I had to conform and take control as we would have sunk without it. But I did it and took charge and we got through it. We survived her schooling, I continued mine as I was able to achieve both my Bachelor’s and Master’s while she was in school as well. There were some tough times, but we knew it would all be worth it in the end. But what came of it was amazing. I am now the financial controller in the house as I typically am the one who comes to her with important financial information and/or decisions, and she graduated into a new career. The day she graduated was possible the proudest day of my life. You see, my wife was dedicated to that school and perfection. 2 years prior, my wife’s sister was also attending the same school for the same profession, Dental Hygiene. During her graduation ceremony, someone received an award for highest GPA for the class. At this time, my wife already knew she would start attending the Dental Hygiene at the same school a couple months later. I whispered to her that I want her to get that award when she graduated. Lo and behold, on the day she graduated, my wife was indeed the recipient of that same award and the amount of pride I held was just an overwhelming feeling. It was an amazing feeling and one I was super proud of.
So with that, I hope some of this information gives anyone reading this some insight into who I am and more importantly, who we are. My hopes for the blog as I mentioned before is to give some guidance for some people and help people understand that when some times things seem lost, don’t worry as there is always a way to get through it and push through adversity. Future posts will be centered on specific events in our lives as well as giving financial information on things I have read and learned and thus possibly dabbled in.
Happy day!
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