About

Welcome!

We’re husband & wife, business partners and best friends. We started this blog as a passion project and a means of research & development to propel us towards our goal of building wealth through generating streams of passive income. Ultimately, we want to retire early and have the flexibility to do what we love with the people we love. We’re excited for you to join us on our journey and become a part of the Unbound Investor community!

-Kathryn & Michael

Our Investing Timeline (So Far)

Before 2016: Just living my life, working full time and trying to get by.

2016: Kate and I start to discuss the possibility of getting into real estate investment. We read books like Rich Dad Poor Dad and listen to the Bigger Pockets Podcast. We find a Realtor and start looking at properties. We even make an offer or two, but nothing happens.

2017: Kate and I continue looking for properties. We meet with banks and find lenders willing to work with us. We meet with bankers from at least 10 different banks in our area. In one month (August), we turn our basement into an Airbnb and list it AND we purchase our first long term rental property, which is a triplex. We can’t find good tenants for our triplex, so it sits vacant the rest of the year.

2018: In April, we finally get our first tenant in the triplex, our second in June and get it fully rented in July. Our basement Airbnb makes so much money that in September we decided to buy a single family home to exclusively rent out on Airbnb. It makes us even more money than the first one!

2019: Kate decides we should put together a mastermind group. So we get in touch with people we know who care about money and start sharing knowledge with each other. Our triplex is profitable, but our two Airbnb properties are making way more money, so we buy another property and put it up on Airbnb and VRBO.

2020: Coronavirus hits in March and all the guests booked at our Airbnb properties cancel. We freak out, but after a few weeks everything comes back and we’re making money again. The real estate market gets very expensive and instead of buying another Airbnb in 2020, we decide to pay off Kate’s school loans with our investing money. Discussion and research from the mastermind group makes me want to investigate online business as an investment strategy. Kate and I started Unbound Investor with plans to purchase a website in 2021.

2021: Our Airbnbs hit new highs after Covid causes more travelers to be wary of using hotels. I spend about 6 months attempting to purchase a million dollar online business with an SBA backed loan only to have the deal come crashing down at the last minute. We lose about $20,000 on the failed investment. The experience makes me re-evaluate and I ended up purchasing a small blog instead called IndoorGamesZone. I also start a new hobby website called Sound Goblin. At the end of the year I begin hiring writers and investing money in online content to grow the online revenue of my 3 websites.

Now you’re all caught up!

Our “Failures”

Kate and I have slowly built up our (partially) passive cash flow over the last several years. Sure, we’ve had some real success with our Airbnb properties, but those successes are surrounded with failures. Sometimes we lose money on something and sometimes we just waste a lot of time pursuing something that doesn’t pan out (and sometimes both).

Our two biggest “failures” so far have been attempting to purchase a $1.5 million commercial property on the main road in our local downtown area (in 2019), and attempting to purchase a $1 million online business (in 2021).

I consider them failures only because we lost money on both and spent months of our time and energy on both. However, we also learned valuable lessons from these two failed investments that inform our decisions as we continue to move forward.

We’ve been lucky so far. When only lost about $7,500 from the commercial property “failure” and only lost about $20,000 from the online business “failure.” While this money hasn’t given us any monetary ROI, I consider it to be the cost of education.

And a lot of that education is being shared here on Unbound Investor.