Before Airbnb was even invented, my husband and I started renting our home to make extra money. We bought multiple homes that we rented on Airbnb throughout the years. Renting your home to strangers for money wasn't even on the horizon when my husband and I bought our first house almost 20 years ago.
But the little bungalow in Louisville, Kentucky , wasn't far from the racetrack where the famous Kentucky Derby runs every May. I thought renting our house to race-goers would be an easy way to make a quick paycheck. So in 2007, before Airbnb was even invented , we'd started what would eventually be called house-hacking — renting your own home to generate income to pay for itself.
We could earn enough over the race weekend to cover three months of mortgage. We were early Airbnb adopters It didn't go well at first, though, with our first guests writing us a bad check. So when Airbnb came along with some guardrails to protect hosts, we were super early adopters.
Although it's commonplace now, in those early days, friends thought we'd lost it when we let strangers stay in our house. "What if they lick your plates and put them back?" I'll always remember one aghast friend asking. Renting out that house led to the idea that we could Airbnb a $17,000 triplex in Detroit we bought in 2014 after I fell in love with the city while visiting.
We were able to use the income to recoup the renovation costs, and we double-dipped by renting our Louisville house anytime we were in Detroit . We d.
