Bryan Fox
“Everything from the way you dress, to the car you drive or your house is all just signaling to say, ‘look I’m doing good,’ to your parents, or friends, or what- ever. I’m happy to be on my own hustle and not have other people think I’m successful or winning”
Bryan Fox
Professional Snowboarder, and property renovator
Portland, Oregon
Bryan’s role as a professional athlete versus what he does as his side hustle is an interesting contrast. On one hand he projects an image of good times on road trips up the west coast of America. An all too easy, laid back lifestyle filled with phenomenal snowboarding which purveys a very aspirational lifestyle.
On the other side, he is only too happy to sleep on the floor in relatively uncomfortable conditions, doing as much work as he can refurbishing houses safe in the knowledge that the sacrifices he is making now will pay off in the long term. It’s a notion that with everything being available quickly to us now, delayed gratification is one of those things that few of us have to think about.
However, that concept is one that has set him up for real success long term. Even if the road to get there was full of learnings and moments where, in hindsight he would have approached things differently. Alongside all this, Bryan has also been inspiring people to see a real solvable problem in the water crisis through the company Drink Water, that he founded with his friends and brother.
Jonathan : So I guess we’re going to get straight into it. You are someone who has bought and improved real estate over the last 10 years or so. What was the first property that you bought?
Bryan : It was a single family home, for $224k near Mt Hood, Oregon. It was a house for myself and my partner at the time, which was, I still look back on as probably one of my worst financial decisions. I put down 20% so around $44k.
I thought it was great, what happened?
I bought it alone, I was living in my buddy’s house before that, for you know $200 a month for a room. Then I bought this house and started paying the full mortgage of $1,300 alone because I was thinking I needed to be an adult and take care of my partner. We broke up, so I didn’t really live there long and so I rented it out and the mortgage on that was covered for the last 12 years. In total I put in about 60k into it.
But now you are selling it to put that money into a beach house so it can’t all be bad?
Yeah now it is but I could have bought a couple of multi-family units instead at the same time and likely been even better set up by now.
So that takes us to your next property, a multi-family duplex in SE Portland? What was the deal with that one?
So my partner and I broke up and that taught me the lesson that I should lean into being young and uncomfortable, may- be something not that plush. So I was like, “yo I want to live in some multi-family home, live in part of it, rent out the other to pay the mortgage and basically live for free.” I wanted to try my hardest to live for free, or at least as cheap as I possibly could, but still live alone. I didn’t really want to have roommates. So I thought my option was to have a multi-family dwelling so that I can basically separate myself, but still live for free.
Now this place was $240k, same deal. I put 20% down and it was in really bad shape. So I instantly gutted the back unit, the one that I deemed to be the nicer unit of the two, and started working straight away on it and probably flipped it in maybe six months. Whatever I felt capable of doing myself, I would do to save money. I was pretty stressed about it until the first rental payment came in. We listed it for $2,000 and went down to $1,850 until we got it rented. My brother was just like, “who cares what you list for, you only need one or two people to think it’s a good deal.”
Three weeks later and like the second I got his check for $1,850, I was like holy shit, I’m making $400 a month to live here. So then at that point I had zero overhead basically as far as housing is concerned in life at the age of 26. Then I started renting my house out when I was travelling for work so it became like $2k a month coming in.
It all sounds great to get to that point of essentially earning income to live somewhere, but I heard some horror stories about that remodel?
Yeah, I mean there’s a production cycle of construction where the electrician can’t come until Friday and I’d just start demoing walls to speed it up and so the place was just a wreck most of the time and not really live-able. That meant I was just living on the floor basically with a bottle to piss in, a two burner camp stove to make mac and cheese with zero comfort. Socially I didn’t mind, I was single, so it didn’t really matter. I was just like, whatever. People would come over and be like, “you live here?” I’d be like, “yeah, this is it.” I feel like those moments were for sure the ones that gave me the perspective flip where you can think to yourself, ‘that’s fine, I don’t need society to think I’m killing it.’
In general though that’s the way it works. Everything from the way you dress, to the car you drive or your house is all just signaling to say, “look I’m doing good,” to your parents, or friends, or whatever. Those couple years of doing up that duplex, it definitely broke me out of that cycle and showed me it’s fine, I’m happy to be on my own hustle and not have other people think I’m successful or winning, as long as I know I have that confidence about what I’m doing. I prefer to earn that $500 bucks on top of my mortgage than to have my homie come over here and be like, “whoa sick house bro.”
That’s a really good long term approach.
I mean it’s a gamble. You know, you never really know, but I definitely looked at it like, I have the time, I have the energy, I have the resources and I like learning new things. Real estate and construction is a really tangible thing that you can teach yourself. It’s not rocket science. You can pretty much go and learn whatever you want, it just takes watching some YouTube and then you can remodel a bathroom.
Do you ever get into arguments with people who find what you do overly capitalist?
Yeah, but I ignore it. I try to surround myself with people who have a similar mentality and I’ve definitely had a number of friends who were going through the process and that is really helpful to have people on that same mindset. Yes it’s capitalism, but you have these opportunities and it’s up to you whether you utilise them. Every house I bought was pretty crappy and I’ve always made them nicer for people to rent, or if I sell them for people to live in, they’ll always be in a nicer form than when I got them and I think that’s like a valuable contribution to society. As for capitalism, I just think you have to try to get that little bit of upper hand even like $500 bucks a month is $6,000 a year. It’s a lot of money that you can put to work.
Why don’t you think people know about money when they come out of school?
I don’t know, its ironic because I advise a few people who are all way more highly educated than me (I only finished high school) but sometimes it’s probably just the need to have it be a conversation within your family or with friends. My dad was a small business owner, just hus- tling everyday so i learnt a lot from him.
What would be one or two things you would say to people thinking about trying to get into buying and renovating houses?
Well, one of them is just straight up changing your own mentality of what a home is. Currently, I live in a house where someone else is renting the basement and I’m a 36 year old, married man. Maybe four times a month I see the renters and we have an awkward conversation, but it’s just work to me, which provides income. That’s kind of the way I think about it. If someone gives you $1,500 dollars a month to have four awkward interactions per month, would you do it? Hell yeah you would. The way the world is going, it’s turning into this task based marketplace where you literally get paid to do single tasks for brands, or for people and housing people is a very steady example of that.
What’s your advice on interest rates?
I think generally interest rates are (depending on the size of the house price) a little bit more important than the sale price. Just as far as amortisation is concerned, over the course of those 30 years that could be a $100,000 difference. Getting a low, simple, 30 year fixed rate is the safest thing. Pay down as much with cash as you can to reduce the length of the term. I try to put an extra couple hundred a month on each to get the loan paid quicker, which results in a lower cost over time. Soon enough you forget you are paying those few hundred a month extra, which you can achieve pretty quickly if you stop going out for coffee.
You don’t go out for coffee?
No, not really. I mean five bucks a day, so $35 a week minimum, that’s $140 a month, $1,600 a year or so.
What would you tell your teenage self ?
I would have told myself not to buy that first house. I bought it for the wrong reasons. I thought that it would bring me that idea that I had succeeded by buying a home, which is such a weird goal.What I learned from that first mistake has fully guided me ever since. Just like, actually I don’t need to fit into that box of what society sees as success. Then in terms of life I would just say keep going, buddy. You know some of it’s gonna suck, but just keep learning and keep trying. Yeah, that’s life.
Drink Water has created a wonderful community, what’s the story with why you started it?
So it was a response to what we saw in a marketing world that we weren’t comfortable with. So we tried to do something about it, by drawing Drink Water on our boards and screen-print- ing sweatshirts in a garage in 2011. As we gave the sweatshirts away to our friends, we learned a lot of other people shared the same thought and Drink Water grew into an initiative, a brand, a movement, and something way bigger than us. It’s not about selling water. We’re actually committed to never sell water. We prefer it from the tap.
How much have you raised so far?
Might be a little under $200k. It’s funny as I wouldn’t say that philanthropy was ever a huge part of my mentality and as all this stuff happened with Drink Water. It’s been cool that it just happened naturally. We were just like, ‘hey, we got this thing going.’ All this is a huge problem in the world. Let’s use this money. Let’s put on events. Let’s raise money for other people since we’re capable of doing it and can help people who need it way more than us.
Thanks so much for your time and honesty
Thanks