Welcome to the cabin. Probably the best part of having my own place is that I can customize everything to my own preferences.
Everything is just soudan exactly how I like it.
Which is really satisfying.
All my tools, this one's pretty gnarly .
My name is Bryce Dishongh and I paid $140,000 for my condo in Austin, Texas.
There wasn't a ton of strategy or buildup to purchasing this place.
My rent kept going up and up and I was like, I just need to get into a fixed mortgage.
If you don't do it now, you're never going to do it.
I had a realtor friends.
We probably looked at 10 places.
So now my current mortgage is $984.
That's never going to change.
I put down six thousand dollars for the condo.
Austin's great. I would suggest not looking at where everybody else wants to live.
I mean, that's just supply and demand.
What I did was compromise.
I'm not really close to downtown, but I'm not really far away either.
So it's a 6,000 square foot condo.
It wasn't anything special.
It was cheap. It had washer dryer stuff, but I wanted to feel spacious.
So I added a lot of things that talk things behind other things in a clean way.
And so there was a creative problem solving aspect to almost everything in here.
Is my potions drawer.
Everything that's kind of a liquid.
This is the primary drawer, even though it doesn't look organized, it kind of is.
I put in roughly $9000 for the renovation.
One really difficult aspects of the renovation was installing a wood ceiling because of gravity.
So I had to take wood flooring and put it on the ceiling, hold it up there and then staple it in with a nail gun.
The boards kept falling on my head and it was very difficult to get that, but I think that it looks really good.
And it was ultimately worth it.
Hardly any contractors were hired.
I did everything myself.
There was an investment of time than anything because I screwed things up and I had to fix them.
So most of the unexpected cost was time.
So I Airbnb this condo.
Any money that I get from Airbnb I can just throw directly toward the principle that month.
I built a solar -powered camper in the back of my truck to help me pay this place off faster, because when I stay there I can sleep in the back of it.
These are Christmas lights.
My camper ultimately costs about $5000-$6000.
And it took a humongous effort.
This one blows air in and this one sucks air out.
So they're installed reverse.
So there's a cycle of airflow whenever you have the windows open.
This thing converts the DC power from the battery, which is down here to AC power.
So you can power things like laptops and phones.
This is where I watch TV.
It's essentially passive income.
I can make $1700 a month on Airbnb, and the only work that I really have to do is use my gym or my work shower.
Whenever I feel like it, I can just hop back there and have this sort of mini adventure.
Living out of the camper is a bit of a sacrifice because you have such little space.
When you rough it like that for quite a while and you come back, you are completely filled with gratitude of the luxuries that you have.
It's definitely not like full on van life, but it is kind of a smaller version of that.
Cooking stuff, it's kind of primordial and takes me back to my evolutionary roots.
Day -to -day tasks become really inconvenient, like showering and dressing.
You don't have your own space to do those things.
I bought the truck in 2018 and I bought it brand new, probably three months later, I started building the camper and the whole idea behind it was to have that camper in the truck for at least 10 years, because in 10 years I plan to pay this place off using the camper as a source of income.
I make over $100k year between my day job and my side hustles depending on how much time I want to put into the side hustles.
I am currently a senior front end developer for an insurance brokerage.
I have another side business where I draw pets wearing clothes and I've done that for about five years and probably the most profitable that business has been.
Was about $20 k and the least profitable, which is this past year was about between $4k-$5k.
Any money that I get from that goes toward the mortgage.
I plan to get a dog myself, probably after I pay his mortgage.
I am an older millennial, which means that I have some characteristics of Gen X, which I'm proud of, but I also have the sort of tech advantage of the millennial generation.
I don't plan to have a family or children, and I think I'm going to take all the money that would ordinarily go to that and just save it and kind of have the earlier retirement.
But right now, I have some pretty heavy blinders on when it comes to paying off my mortgage.
That's kind of what I'm focusing on.
That's kind of my purpose in life.
I don't like debt. The only debt I have is this condo.
I paid my truck off the same year I bought it.
I feel comforted by it, by knowing that, like , this is my space.
You know, it's paid off and I don't have any debt to anybody.
Just that freedom is my number one goal right now.