Early on in our careers, we’re taught that any self-respecting medical professional needs to buy a house even before we can gain some financial stability. Obviously moving down to New Orleans I was doing the same thing, trying to look at single family houses for myself. Then Covid hit and everything was shut down. Before Covid I used to travel a lot, but now there was nowhere to travel. So with lots of time on my hands, I got into educating myself about financial independence.

We don’t get enough financial education

One of the drawbacks for anybody in medicine, whether you are a nurse, a technician or a pharmacist, is that even though we spend most of our lives studying, we don’t get financial education at all. We don’t get people talking to us about how to invest in real estate, or invest in stocks or even save some money.

So we get used to living paycheck to paycheck, because we don’t know any better. I wanted to break free of that cycle and that’s when I was introduced to House Hacking. I decided that instead of buying a single-family house, I would start buying a Multi Family house and live in it. And that’s how investing in real estate and my financial freedom journey started.

It’s about team work

For me, house hacking has given me that time and freedom. House hacking is basically purchasing a property, living in part of it, and renting out the rest. This way you can live in the house while a significant portion of the mortgage is paid by your roommates or tenants. You see… It’s all about teamwork! Something that comes to us naturally.

Let me just put it this way: it’s like working at a Hospital. When you have residents, medical students, nurses, EMTs, technicians and all these people helping you out, the amount of work you can do grows exponentially and the amount of work you have to do reduces as well.

In other words, you free up your time to do other things. This is true not only for doctors, but also for nurses, technicians and pretty much anyone in the healthcare industry. The more people working on the same task, the more time you are freeing. Simple as that!

It’s about living rent free

The tenants, by paying my mortgage and my living expenses, have allowed my housing expenses to be zero. You could be getting paid to live in the house of your dreams -How cool is that! 

This allows us to enjoy practicing medicine on our own terms and to do other things that we enjoy, such as traveling, crossfit, educating residents, doing research and even spending time with our cats!