How to use your primary home as the foundation of a larger portfolio

Chris Meunier is a program manager working at Google, but one of his biggest passions is real estate investing and personal finances. Over the past 10+ years, he has worked to build a real estate portfolio with his wife, Jessica, which includes a primary residence in the SF Bay Area and rental properties in California, Indiana and Georgia. Chris believes there are many strategies to achieve your real estate goals and they can be used to accelerate and generate wealth. When not working his day job or keeping an eye on the real estate market, you can find Chris spending time with his family, hiking outside with his dog or planning his next ski trip.  In this episode, Chris will share how he started in the real estate business as an investor, some tips & insights and how he found a platform that provided a holistic approach to him. Chris always enjoys talking real estate and personal finances, and you can reach him directly at [email protected]. --- Before we jump into the episode, here's a quick disclaimer about our content. The Remote Real Estate Investor podcast is for informational purposes only, and is not intended as investment advice. The views, opinions and strategies of both the hosts and the guests are their own and should not be considered as guidance from Roofstock. Make sure to always run your own numbers, make your own independent decisions and seek investment advice from licensed professionals.   Michael: What's going on everyone? Welcome to another episode of the Remote Real Estate Investor. My name is Michael Albaum and today with me, I have Chris Meunier, who's talking to us about, what it's like to convert your primary into a rental and how he's scaling out estate and what that looks like. So let's get into it.   Hey, Chris, what's going on? Man, thanks so much for coming on and hanging out with me. I appreciate you.   Chris: Yeah, thanks for having me, Michael.   Michael: No, my pleasure. So in… you know, I obviously know you and we have a relationship. And so I would love if you could just give everyone listening a background of who you are, and how you got started in real estate.   Chris: Sure! So my name is Chris. My wife and I have, we've been married about almost 10 years now. And I work my day job at Google. My wife's a, she's an entrepreneur, a personal finance coach, which is really exciting. So we're both very passionate about helping people with their finances and real estate as well.   And going back a bit, I grew up in a family that was very focused on real estate and had a lot of family members who work in real estate. My dad was an agent, my brother's an agent, uncles and aunts who've done you know, home inspections and things like that. So I was surrounded by all of that growing up, I bought my first property back in 2009, a condo in the San Jose area of California, and, and did whatever it took to get in there, I put 3% down. Because I knew that the earlier I could get in and get my foot in the door that it would be well worth it. And sure enough, it was and I still have that property as a rental. And then I think from there, we've… we've really just kind of kept building from there and look for ways to not just focus on our primary residence, but look for ways out of state as well to build our real estate portfolio. So that's kind of a little bit of background on where we've come from and where we got into today.   Michael: Awesome. And, and just with the goal of being fully transparent, you are a Roofstock Academy member, right?   Chris: Yeah, we've been for I think, a year or two now we've been with the Academy. And I've really enjoyed it and got a lot of value out of the courses. I'm a program manager in my day job so I've taken I built a lot of Evernote sheets and took copious notes and action items and things like that. So we've really gotten a lot of value out of the academy. And I used it to really, like, analyze properties differently and build out like our ten year plan a