Three Approaches I've Actually Seen Work
The first is the one most people have heard about: house hacking.
You buy a home with the specific intention of renting out part of it. It is popular for a reason.
Zillow found that 39 percent of successful buyers said the ability to rent out part of their home mattered to them, a share that jumps to 51 percent for Gen Z and 55 percent for millennials, up about 15 points since before the pandemic (Zillow via CBS Austin).
Every deal is different and has to be run on its own numbers, so treat what follows as one person's approach, not a formula.
The buyer I know looked for two unglamorous things: lots of bathrooms and lots of parking. Then he added a bedroom through a minor renovation, shrinking a living room, which changed the math in his favor.
He lived in the house while renting out three or four bedrooms, and the rent completely or mostly covered his mortgage. on top of working a full-time job.
He has since moved out, rented his own room to yet another tenant, and now rents a place elsewhere that fits his lifestyle better while the house pays for itself.
The second is house sitting + life on the road.
A couple I know built their housing around TrustedHousesitters, a membership platform where people watch homes and pets in exchange for a free place to stay.
It is not a fringe idea. The platform reports more than 240,000 members across 180 countries and over 16 million nights of pet sitting (TrustedHousesitters).
They paired it with a livable van and did this for years as a couple, which let them chase their goals with little to no steady income.
Living on the road is becoming far more common: about 486,000 people now live full-time in RVs, more than double the 2021 count (RV Industry Association via CNBC), and the Census Bureau counted roughly 342,000 people living in RVs, boats, or vans in 2023, up 41 percent since 2019 (U.S. Census Bureau via CNBC).
With low housing cost, they can more easily save and hit their goals. They recently set some entrepreneurial pursuits aside and took full-time jobs, but they kept the house-sitting lifestyle and are now saving gobs of cash for their future rather than handing it to a landlord.
The third is the most Spartan, and my favorite because I’ve never heard anyone else do it.
An e-commerce business owner in Dallas lived, for a time, inside the warehouse he used to store his inventory. While he was scaling the business as a solopreneur!
He renovated part of it to add a shower and bath, and he was careful to keep it all within code. That matters, because Dallas actually permits live/work arrangements in certain districts, including light industrial zones, with a minimum residential size and specific occupancy and parking rules (City of Dallas).
He was in a light industrial zone close to downtown, and he described it as walkable and a genuinely fun chapter of his life.
Not glamorous. Very bare-bones. But it let him pour time and money into the business instead of rent.
