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Cheapest House in Denver

[0:00] This is the cheapest house in Denver for sale right now. You got a lot of natural light through the door because the lights don't work. Welcome to your new bedroom. If you're going to buy this place to live in it without any renovations, you can wake up and look at your broke self every day. For the kitchen, this is your storage space for the stinks. This is the kitchen. There is a lot of open space in this kitchen. So, that's pretty cool. This is going to be your restroom with a bathtub shower combo and a dark corner where you can wash your face. Isn't that practical? And the nicest thing about this home is this backyard. You got an attached garage and lots of dirt for potential grass or more dirt, whichever one you want. Dirt seems to fit this house pretty well.

[0:39] And this is what has so many people that move here end up going broke because they're just turning out to be houseport because even for 250,000 that gets you nothing here. Like you pretty much got to start at the 400s and even then it gets a little bit dicey. And hopefully you're okay with a condo or a smaller town home. Uh because there just aren't many options out there, you know, and this was the cheapest house at the time, 240,000 for this. And I got to say, I'm going to I got to tip my own hat to this one. I actually did have the cheapest sale in Denver just a couple of years ago, and it was this one.

Purchase Price and History

[1:17] It was a rough duck. The whole thing needs to be pretty much gut and redone. It was 250,000 at the time. Sold it quickly. Wasn't much of a problem. So when a lot of people look here from out of state, they just get super depressed because they realize that, you know, even for 600,000, like what they might be looking at in their city in the, you know, mid to upper 30s is just the reality here. Now, not to make light like of people being, you know, house poor, uh, but there's a lot of younger people specifically, and you'll see in these videos, that don't quite know what they're getting into when it comes to home ownership in general.

Regrets and Housing Decisions

[1:59] I think I fully regret buying a house now. Like, it's not the worst choice I ever made, but it's so expensive, but at the same time, it's exactly what rent would be costing me anyways. I'm almost an hour away from where I want to be and almost an hour away from work, which all right, I want to pause it here because that is about the best thing you can do. When I talk to first-time home buyers that are struggling with affording stuff, I mean, I'm from Chicago originally, right? Where it was not uncommon to drive 45 minutes to an hour each way to work cuz that's just what you did if you didn't want to live in the city, right? And you wanted to be out in the suburbs where it was a little bit safer, a little bit quieter, you could park in front of your house, have a garage, things like that. buy where you don't want what you don't want as your first home.

[2:44] Lim it for 5 to seven years. Once you know kids start coming along, now you look to take that equity and slam it into something in the five or 600,000s, right? Get that two-bedroom, one bath condo. Deal with it. That's what our parents did. That's what their parents did before them. Except they actually never end up selling their places. They're still living in those places. our parents, the boobers generation, those that's the one that, you know, did all this crazy move up buying. But you have to change what you're willing to deal with because this young man in 5 years, if he sticks it out, will likely have $75,000 plus to put into what he actually wants.

[3:21] It's a lot of upkeep, a lot of maintenance. I feel like the housing market could crash at any minute, and interest rates were high when I bought it, and so were prices. I rationalized it by telling myself, well, it's the same amount as rent and I should get something back out of it at the end of the day, which honestly at this point might not even be true. And I'm far away from everything and I have an hour long commute and I'm tired and I'm in a three-bedroom house and I live alone. I'm thankful, very thankful that I'm able to do this. Don't get me wrong. I just don't know if it was the right choice and I'm stressing over it right now and I've only been here for like 8 months.

[3:57] I don't know what to do. You live there. That's what you do. you go through the process of being a homeowner. You know, when me and the wife started looking for a place uh in Parker during COVID, we didn't end up pulling the trigger. Well, we tried to pull the trigger on a handful of them. We just kept getting the crap kicked out of us by competing offers at the time. Uh but we couldn't make the move then, so we had to wait another four more years. Daughter being in high school, all that good stuff. What we've seen since really tracking the market closely on four to five acre properties down there is that the turnover is actually quite a bit higher than we thought. Why?

Home Search and Challenges

[4:27] because people that want more space don't actually understand what it's like to own a home. And that especially when you're on four or five acres, like it's not quite a full-time job, but I'll be darned if it's less than 20 hours a week, unless you got a new build property and you just don't do anything on the outside of it. If you got a standard home built 30, 40, 50 years ago, I mean, you might have to cut hay once or twice a year and pay people to do that. You might have a thousand foot long driveway that you have to have plowed in the wintertime, right? You might have snow drifts that pile up on the side of the house and they're there for several months that you know deteriorate the paint. And you might have a 1500 square foot deck. Oh my god.

[5:03] Don't get me started about the decks and Parker that have to be redone every couple years because the sun is just beating down on them. Like houses do take maintenance, but that's that's the name of the game, ladies and gentlemen. We saw our parents create millions of dollars of generational wealth with owning a home and they just were able to do it a little bit differently. But now we got to suck it up, get in to what we can when we can, and ride it out.

[5:30] My biggest financial regret that I've ever had in life was purchasing a home back in 2021 for these three reasons. Number one, I had to put a 30% down payment on my home. Who has to put 30% down? I don't know what kind of loan that is. So, I'm going to call that out first of all. And if you bought in 2021, we're talking 5 years ago now. Um you have appreciated by 20 plus%. Just I'm just going to put that out there right now.

[5:57] Uh my down payment was roughly around $330,000. I bought my Okay, so we're talking million dollar plus. My two-bedroom, three bath town home for $910,000. And the reason why we had to put so much down at the time was just because of my income. was only a key around to 100 $110,000. Gotcha. So, they were not approved for 910,000 and so they basically, you know, 20% of 910,000, whatever that number is, uh they had to supplement it with additional cash because they literally couldn't afford the monthly payments for the income. $910,000 house and your yearly income is 110,000 a year. No, that's that's wrong. like I I don't see anybody really doing that. Why? Because it generally makes zero sense.

Financial Returns on Home

[6:48] That was the only way we could get the math work. Now, my monthly mortgage payment, if you factor in uh interest, taxes, uh HOA, etc. It's roughly around $4,200. If I was renting right now, I could probably rent a really nice two-bedroom condo or apartment for $3,500. So that would save me $700 a month. However, had I just not bought a home, I could have taken that 300 and, you know, 10,000, $20,000 that I used as a down payment and just invested in the stock market. We all know the stock market bottomed in 2022 and, you know, [ __ ] man, you see where it is today, right? I could easily have an extra at the very minimum couple hundred,000 in my stock portfolio.

[7:36] Yeah. And if I would have taken $100 a decade ago and put it into Bitcoin, I'd be a multi-billionaire. Everything's 2020 in retrospect, folks. You can play these whatif games all day, every stinking day. But this math, this doesn't really track it. Number two, in the market that I live in, renting is actually cheaper than buying a home. Again, as I previously stated, I probably am paying an extra, I don't know, 700 to $1,000 more per month by owning a home rather than renting one.

Rent vs Buy Analysis

[8:12] And then number three, owning a home is just really, really overrated. There's maintenance um that you have to worry about. I've already had to replace an AC, and my home is like 3 to four years old, so it's it's actually really really new. I'm sure at some point I'm going to have to replace a dishwasher, a washer and dryer. Owning a home is not cheap. There are a lot of expenses that come with maintaining a home and you have to do it yourself. If I lived in an apartment complex, I could call the landlord and then they would send somebody to help me fix the problem and then they could also leave a note on your door the next day that says you got to move out in 30 days.

Home Maintenance Reality

[8:46] Honestly, if I could do it again, I would just rent a nicer apartment or a condo, whatever, in a nicer community and then just invested my money instead in the stock market. But again, everybody's different. Um, you know, everybody has different ways to invest and build wealth. Um, real estate is not one avenue of building wealth that I really like. So, let's do some simple math on this. He bought his place for 910,000 in 2021. Since then, everywhere in this country is still up by 25%. Some places quite a bit more, like 50%. We'll give him the benefit of the doubt and say at the bare minimum, it's worth 25% more now than it was when he bought it.

[9:24] that would be worth 1.1375. Okay, so let's take that and subtract out the 910 that he paid for it. So that's $227,500 here in potential equity, right? You got some selling costs on there. I'm not blind to that. So let's say he's made $150,000 of equity if he were to sell today, right? He says put it in the stock market. That that's great if you were to put it in the right stocks at the time. Sure, that 310,000, you'd have to make 50% on that. So, you'd have to be really good in the last 5 years to make 50% on that unless you just buy the S&P and that might be up 100ish% and that's only if you bought at the bottom. So, again, you can speculate and you can live, you know, in the rearview mirrors talking about what you should have, could have, would have done, but at the end of the day, this person has a guaranteed $150,000 plus sitting there in equity plus whatever he's paid off. Yes, there's maintenance.

[10:23] And I always tell people, expect 1.5% a year of the value of the property to be in maintenance. So, if it's worth a million dollars, I would expect to spend $15,000 on average between paint jobs and landscaping and, you know, roof over the years and appliances and what have you. Like, yes, homes do take maintenance, but that's why you get tax write-offs. That's why there are benefits. The most amount of wealth that has been created has been created by real estate. We're talking not one or two times more. We're talking nine out of 10 millionaires made their money in real estate.

[10:56] I regret buying this house. That's what I've been thinking every single day for like the past 2 months. It has been hell and I lost control and I was just able to gain back control. There's nothing that sucks more than working so hard to achieve a goal like this. And to not even feel at home in my own house is absolutely heartbreaking. Like I worked so hard from the for this house and I've been homeless before and I should be grateful and I am. But with everything going on, it's kind of hard to, but I'm I'm ready and I have a mindset to completely take ownership of this house and move forward from here on out. I wanted to do everything at once, which was a big mistake. Every single house owner that I spoken to just told me the same thing. It's a process. It's baby steps, and you're not going to get everything done in one day. Give yourself grace. just focus on the things you need to focus on and the rest will fall into place.

[11:46] Yeah. And so I actually see a lot of uh first-time home buyers fall into this trap and of wanting to do all these projects, right? And they're like, "Oh, we want to, you know, redo the landscaping in the front yard, and then we got to do the backyard, then we're going to, you know, we're going to paint the house cuz we don't like the paint color. Then we got to paint the inside of the house, too. Duh, because I don't want someone else's paint here. And then I want to paint the cabinets, too. And we're going to replace the harden the knobs and pulls on all." All right, take a deep breath here. One thing at a time.

First-Time Buyer Mistakes

[12:14] Don't go buy materials for two or three different projects, right? You're going to live in a project/war zone for the rest of your life. One project, get it done, focus there. Then, and only then, after taking a couple weeks off from doing a project, should you even start a second one. Uh, you see a lot of people do this, and it's just natural like, "Oh, I finally bought my own house. Now I got to make it my own." Chill out for a few months. Go live in there. See what you like. see what you don't like about it first, then take the next steps. Now, if you are thinking of making the move to our amazing city and stayed here, uh feel free. You can call me, text me, reach out, or if you're left with a ton of questions after this, just go ahead and download my relocation buyer guide cuz it's going to answer so many of the questions that you have kind of mullled around in your brain about this incredible place. But at the end of the day, if you really want to know what I've regretted about moving to Colorado, nothing, folks. I love it here. I have been here for 25 years and I'm from Chicago originally and it is just the best place I could possibly imagine to be. The mountains are outside our back door. Within 45 minutes I could be out of cell phone service. We could be camping. We could be hiking. We could be mountain biking, skiing hour and a half away. There's some that are closer but they're small. Like we work to live here. Uh and yes, we are very blessed to be here. And you know, it isn't as cheap as other places go, but it's still only 10 to 15% more than most other cities in this country. And yes, I will pay that every single time to have a better quality of life. Things just naturally uh spill off into you. You know, you you absorb it via osmosis, right? Uh eating more organic, right? eating more healthy, being around people that are running daily, biking daily, uh climbing, you know, when your friend comes back from work and they're like, "Dude, we just got back from Moab and it was amazing and we went climbing. We went hiking. We went to this national park and that national park." Yes, I know Moab is in Utah, but it's kind of like our backyard. Um, and then all the just incredible adventures that you hear people going on, going to hot springs and doing the things that people vacation here from out of state and save up for many, many years to go do it and we can just go do it on the weekend. And there is no way you can convince me that I am not a happier person and I don't live a happier life because of everything right there. I've been having a bad day. If I could check out within 30 minutes, 45 minutes, poof, in the middle of nowhere, right in the most beautiful place in the world. Now, undoubtedly, when people want to move here, they always want to talk about living in the foothills outside of Denver because that's the lifestyle.

Colorado Living Benefits

[14:51] Which is why I put together this video, which is going to answer all of your questions about what it's really like to live at about 8,000