How to Turn Your “Stuff” Into Cash-Flowing Assets (And Buy More Rentals)

Ashley Kehr:Most rookies think creative financing means one thing, getting a deal with no money down. But today’s guest has built a portfolio across multiple countries, multiple asset types, and multiple income streams, all while stationed overseas with the military. And she did it without waiting for perfect conditions.

Henry Washington:Kimber Raichi is an Air Force veteran, PhD candidate and founder of Pathfinder, and she’s used seller financing, IRA lending, and even her own camper and truck to build cashflow for her family.

Ashley Kehr:This is The Real Estate Rookie Podcast, and I’m Ashley Kerr.

Henry Washington:And I’m Tony J. Robinson. With that, let’s give a big warm welcome to Kimber. Kimber, thank you for joining us on the Real Estate Rookie Podcast. Happy to have you.

Kimber Rachuy:Thank you so much. I’m so excited to be here.

Ashley Kehr:So Kimber, give us the background on who you are, where you are now in life, and how did you get started in real estate?

Kimber Rachuy:Well, I guess I’ll start from when I joined the military. I joined in 2010 and my first base was in Germany. When I was getting ready to move from there to Utah at my next duty station in 2013, one of my mentors was kind of telling me, “Hey, you should really just buy a house when you move because you’re already going to get housing allowance from the military.” So when I moved there at 22, I bought my first house by myself and that kind of just got me really interested in, “Hey, there’s other things I could be doing.” So I had my first house. I met my husband there. He’s still active duty in the military. And we ended up going to Korea for a year. We were at separate bases there. We ended up coming back to Utah again. We went there to try and go somewhere new, but we ended up right back in Utah.We bought another house there, but I had sold the first one, so unfortunately I didn’t get the chance to maximize that, but I bought it with a VA loan and I didn’t have to have any money down.And my mortgage was like $700. So it was really kind of easy to navigate. And when we bought our second home, we had our kids and ended up getting out of the military. During COVID, I ended up buying an incubator and I was hatching out chickens on the side.

Ashley Kehr:At first, I thought you were talking about an incubator business, a startup business from an incubator.

Kimber Rachuy:It was during COVID and everyone wanted to start their own farm, so I tried to aid that as much as I could. And we bought our camper and when we weren’t utilizing it, I was renting it out on other platforms. And my motto the whole time has been turning our liabilities into assets. So anything that we have that I could potentially put to work, I’m trying to do that. So we moved to England. We just came back from there. So we moved to England in 2021, and that kind of got us started in a rental. So our Utah house was getting rented out. And in 2022, we bought a home in England.A lot of people didn’t think it could be done for one of five people I know maybe that bought houses over there. And now that’s being rented out. We’re in Virginia. We’ve done all sorts of extra, I guess, side hustles, you could say. If it’s a potential, I’m going to try it. And right now I have a deal that should be closing in the end of May from mobile home park. I’m going to be using my home equity to do the down payment, and the rest of it’s going to be seller financed. So I’m super excited about that. It just kind of sucked upon. I saw- I

Henry Washington:Mean, you’ve been in so many different scenarios already, like Incubator, England, all over the place, Utah, Korea. Give us the quick overview. What does your portfolio look like today?

Kimber Rachuy:So to put it in simple terms, we have a home in Utah that’s being rented out with long-term tenants. They’ll actually be sadly moving out this summer because they want to buy their own home. They’ve been great. And it’s on an acre. It does great in the area it’s in. It’s close to the base. And then we have our home in England that we’re renting out right now, and that’s also close to the base. So our Target is kind of military members potentially because it kind of secures us for the two to three years that they’re potentially going to be there. And we bought a home here in Virginia. So the home in Utah, I’m a home in Virginia on VA loans. And then I’m going to be buying this mobile home park. We rent out our camper. We were running out our truck. And I just got my Virginia notary certification.So I’m just like, now that we’re back in the States, I’m ready to just go full throttle on everything and just do what I can for my family.

Ashley Kehr:Well, Kimber, I want to tell you, first of all, thank you for your service and your husband’s service also. Let’s go back to the beginning and let’s start with that Utah house. So you made a decision to rent it out instead of selling it. And why did you make that decision and how did you end up managing the property and what was it like being a landlord for you to begin with?

Kimber Rachuy:It’s like a very complicated story. We ended up having someone interested that wanted to rent it out because they knew we were moving. So we did that. And we initially had a couple property managers, but there was just so many issues and lack of communication. And I eventually just kind of took it over. I use online platform for property management for myself, for our property. I have an agent there that I work with that helps with showings and doing routine check-ins every so often.

Ashley Kehr:How was the process? Was it what you expected when you rented it out? Did you find it easier than you thought?

Kimber Rachuy:The biggest mistake we made kind of was not having the best practices in place right away. We just had a basic lease and that was a big mistake. So now I’ve learned from that and we have a great attorney that put together an amazing lease for this home. Yes, it was a big investment to pay the attorney to do it, but it’s paying off. And that’s something I wish I would’ve done from the beginning, but it was a good learning experience and now I can put that to practice with everything else I’m doing.

Henry Washington:Kimber, it sounds like something may have happened that I encourage you to go pay an attorney to build out this new lease. You want to share with us?

Kimber Rachuy:Yes. I don’t want to deep dive onto it. I will just say like, oh, we had some things happen when a tenant moved out and it has just piled into this long, ongoing thing. Hopefully it’s going to be over with in the next couple months, but all of our other tenants have been great and we haven’t had any issues after that.

Henry Washington:Kimber, for Ricky’s that are looking to get started, because obviously it sounds like you had a bad experience with the tenant, which is an unfortunate part of being a landlord. And usually it’s not a matter of if that happens, but just when. Sounds like it happened maybe a little bit earlier for you in your investing career, but for all of the rookies that are listening, whether it’s either specifically about the lease or maybe how you screened, what are the lessons you took away from this experience that you would pass down to the folks who are looking to get that first tenant and their first rental?

Kimber Rachuy:What I would suggest is treat it like a business from the very start. Don’t kind of skimp on anything, I guess. Going for the basic lease that fulfilled what we needed and I didn’t know any better at the time. I didn’t think about having an attorney go ahead and do a lease special for our property. So I think that was the biggest thing. And especially since we weren’t in the same location, we were overseas, which is like thousands of miles away. It’s a long flight to get there if something drastic happened that I had to go there. So having a trusted person there to be able to help us, and we do have that now. It’s a realtor that we’ve known. He actually sold us the house and we just have a really good relationship with him and he’s trustworthy. I can count on him to be able to be my backup, like my eyes on the site when I need it.

Henry Washington:Last question. How much did your attorney charge you for the lease, just so Rickies have a sense of what it costs, at least in your market?

Kimber Rachuy:Okay. So in our market, it was with the revisions and everything after I reviewed it, it was about $3,000, but it’s also like a 25-page lease that covers everything, just not only to cover us, but to cover the tenants as well and making sure that we have everything in accordance with Utah law. We’re good to go on anything that could be questionable. So if they have any questions about if they can have a pet or if they can paint or make any kind of modifications, like getting permission beforehand and stuff like that.

Ashley Kehr:When I first started as a property manager, before I had any rentals of my own, the very first day I was put into an office and was like, “Here you go. Here’s a drawer full of lease agreements.” It was a one-page lease agreement. And I mean, I’d never managed a property. I don’t think I’d ever even seen a lease. I mean, when I was in college, I lived on campus. I probably had to sign some kind of lease, but I don’t know. I was just piled in all the documents I had to sign for college, but I knew that this probably wasn’t right, that it was just one page. And this was for a 40 unit apartment complex. It wasn’t like it was just a single family home. And over time, I started to ask people to see their leases and things like that and worked with an attorney to develop an actual lease agreement and not just this one pager.But that I just think a lease agreement can protect you in so many ways. It can be the bad guy. Every year, I send my lease agreement to my attorney and I say, “Can you review it? ” My attorney works with a ton of investors, a ton of landlords. I want to know if an issue came up throughout that year that never has happened before, but happened, I want to be protected now when I do all my lease renewals for the year. And it’s not very costly. Once you have the lease agreement built out to have them review it every year, I don’t even know if I’m getting charged for it, but to get it reviewed every year, it doesn’t take that much time to ask for it. So that’s something else you guys could put into your asset management list for everyone listening, is to make sure that you are updating your lease agreements every single year, or if you had something happen yourself too, that you need to take care of.

Kimber Rachuy:Yeah, definitely. I’m so glad that we just went ahead and I guess bit the bullet, as you’d say, and paid for it and got it done because now I have a little bit more of peace of mind. And if something happens, it’s already laid out and what can and can’t be done and what happens if something else happens.

Ashley Kehr:Coming up, Kimber is about to close on a mobile home park through a seller finance deal. We’re also going to learn how she’s been able to finance her deals. We’ll be right back after word from our show sponsors. Okay. Welcome back. We’re going to talk about something that most of you are probably wondering about. So Kimber, you were lending money through your IRA. First of all, how did you even know this was possible to purchase a property and can you explain to us how it actually works?

Kimber Rachuy:So I ended up finding a mastermind group and I went on a retreat in 2025. It was a retreat in Tennessee. I met a bunch of other ladies and some of them were talking about they were lending their money out via an IRA to other investors. So I got the name of the lady. She was also affiliated with the other people in this mastermind. And I just reached out to her and I was like, “Hey, I have my money in Vanguard right now, but I’m thinking of switching it over to something so I can lend it out on deals.” So I ended up moving all my money over to Madison Trust, which is where you can put your IRA money and lend it out to other people. And her company sent me a couple slide decks of a couple different investors that were looking for capital on deals they were doing.And there was one in Tennessee that was a three bed, two and a half bath, I think, and it was getting renovated. So I ended up lending out $38,000 something dollars and I was getting 10% interest a month, but actually this was my first time doing it. And the borrower, when it came time to finish paying out at the end of the term, he pretty much ghosted the company and hasn’t been answering anyone.Multiple chances reaching out, reaching out, reaching out. Finally, the company I’m working with, it got their foreclosure attorney and he just filed all the paperwork to get it going. So basically, I mean, my money’s guaranteed, so I’m not freaking out because I’m not the one doing all the little details like I normally am. They’re handling it all. So they’re going through foreclosure. And what’s going to happen is if nobody puts a bid on it, that’s what we need to at least get paid out as, then it reverts to the company and they’ll either wholesale it or they’ll finish out the rehab, whatever else needs done, and then just we’ll sell it at market, which could potentially be better for us investors because we could get a bigger payout.

Ashley Kehr:So this I think is a huge cautionary tale of there is some risk to doing this, but also there can be a lot of upside of investing in a deal. I do have a self-directed IRA also. I just did it last year. I rolled money from an old 401k into it and I actually invested in a tech company where it’s a lot longer waiting period to actually make any money off of it. But I think it is so interesting is how you can take this money if you have money sitting and you have it invested in stocks and it’s your retirement money, you can go ahead and put it into a self-directed IRA and actually use it to lend out on other people’s deals if you want to kind of diversify your retirement or your portfolio by investing in other people’s deals. There are lots of rules and regulations that you have to follow.I can’t go and invest in my own deal, things like that. Unfortunately. Yeah. Yeah. Tony, have you ever done a self-directed IRA?

Henry Washington:I haven’t, no. Yeah. I’ve never explored it, but there’s definitely a benefit to it. I’ve worked with a lot of my private money lenders who use self-directed IRAs or solo 401ks, but never personally.

Ashley Kehr:So Kimber, you’ve been able to do this with your IRA to diversify into real estate. How are some of the ways that you have funded your deals? You did mention a little bit about a VA loan and create a finance. Kind of tell us how you’ve been able to do all this funding.

Kimber Rachuy:So the first home I bought was VA loan. The second home we bought in Utah was also a VA loan, and it still has the VA loan on it.

Henry Washington:Can I ask one follow-up question on that? Because I think there’s a lot of-

Kimber Rachuy:Oh, a limit?

Henry Washington:Yeah, yeah. There’s a lot of confusion, I think, around the limits around a VA loan where some folks think that you can only have one loan out at one time, but we’ve interviewed guests who said there’s actually a limit as long as you’re under that limit, you can potentially get multiple properties. So walk us through, because it sounds like you purchased two properties, both with a VA loan. Did you have to refinance that first VA loan first to purchase the second, or were you able to have two open VA loans at the same time?

Kimber Rachuy:No, you can have multiple VA loans open at the same time. There is a threshold, and I’m not sure of the exact dollar amount. It’s pretty high though, but you can have, even after we’re here for two years and say we end up having to move somewhere else and we’re going to rent this out, we’ll still be able to buy another house with a VA loan.

Ashley Kehr:Is that because your husband is active military?

Kimber Rachuy:I would still have some benefit left probably, but he also has his benefit as well, but we use mine because since I’m a disabled veteran with the VA, I don’t have to pay a funding fee. Usually that’s the one kicker to the VA loan is there’s a funding fee on it, which could be from $3,000 to $10,000 or whatever. So that’s waived for disabled veterans if you’re able to do it. But it gets added onto the loan. It’s not like you have to pay it as a down payment or anything like that.

Ashley Kehr:Isn’t there another thing with the VA loan is to the interest rate, it’s like RBFL or something where even when you close on the loan after so many months, you can go and refinance it or you’re not refinancing it, but they’ll adjust your rate.

Kimber Rachuy:I haven’t done that and I haven’t heard of that, but we refinanced our home in Utah. And I’ll actually tell you guys, we have a 2.25 interest rate on our home in Utah, and I will never refinance that house. We refinanced it after we initially bought it and got a point lower, so we will be keeping that forever. The home in England, so when we moved to England, we had two newer vehicles, and this was in 2021. There was a big thing going on with vehicle chips, not having enough of the chips for the vehicles. I don’t know if you guys remember that. There was a shortage on new … Yeah, there was a shortage on new vehicles because they didn’t have all these microchips. They weren’t being made or something like that during the whole COVID era. So we ended up selling our two vehicles and we actually got more for the one than what we paid for it.Yeah. So I was like, yeah,

Henry Washington:Well- I spoke one during COVID as well, and it was the same thing.

Kimber Rachuy:Yeah. So we sold them and then we ended up having a decent amount in our savings when we got to England. And that’s when I started asking in the local community there of military families like, “Hey, has anyone bought a house here?” And a lot of people were just such Debbie Downers about it like, “Oh, you can’t do that. It’s such a long process. You’ll never get approved.” They don’t lend to Americans, but obviously they do. We have our home now and that’s where we use the down payment money from, was from selling our vehicles and other people that are there, because I post about it in groups there still to kind of give people info and people will tag me with questions. So the one thing I try to tell people is just be creative, what asset do you have that you could potentially use to buy a house there?Because we were actually going to buy a second home before we left there, but the sellers ended up not wanting to do some fixes to the electrical systems and stuff like that. So the sale, we didn’t go through with it. And then we ended up moving shortly after. So we were going to use a home equity from our Utah home to buy or to do the down payment on it.Yeah. So there’s always some sort of creative way to get into the home there.

Ashley Kehr:I love how your mind thinks about these things and the creativity of where … I always call it where to find money, like, oh, looking under the mattress, but actually creative in factual ways, but what assets can I look at to pull money out of what liabilities can I sell? Things like that. I think that’s great you have that creative mind. I did pull up real quick what that thing is called with the interest rate and it’s IRRL. Okay. So whatever I said, there’s no F in it or whatever, but it’s interest rate reduction refinance loan with the VA. And so you get to refinance your loan. Basically, they’re just giving you a new interest rate. So if you close down your VA loan and then rates dropped afterwards, you could do this. And it’s like a super speedy, quick thing. And I think you get to do it one time after you’ve gotten the loan.So I just like quickly glancing at it. I don’t see an expiration date, not that you’re going to want to do it for your 2% loan or be able to anytime soon at least. But yeah, so it’s just like there are such cool benefits of the VA loans.

Kimber Rachuy:No, definitely. And I think a lot of people don’t realize they can utilize it.

Henry Washington:Well, the VA is one form of financing, but Kimber, you mentioned you’re closing on a mobile home park deal as well, and you used seller financing for that one. So I guess first sales, how did you find this mobile home park in Louisiana and how did seller financing even come into the picture?

Kimber Rachuy:This retreat that I went to last year, I met a bunch of people that I’ve already seen on the video calls through the classes we’ve done. And I talked to her and I have her on Facebook and I knew that she owned a tanning salon and I saw she sold it to another girl that lives in Louisiana that I also know from this group. And I was like, “Oh, Michelle, did you buy this? ” Buy her tanning salon. And she’s like, “Oh yeah, I did. I got it from Stacy.” And so she commented on her and she’s like, “Oh, I’m also going to sell my house and my two mobile home parks.” I was like, “Oh, okay.” And I was like, “I’m interested.” So I started messenger, I got her number, she gave me all of the info I needed to kind of do my number crunching and figuring out if it would benefit me in a way that I think would be worth it to her and to me.And she told me how much she wanted down. She wanted 20% down. So we worked on a number that worked for both of us on her three unit park. It’s on a little over three acres and it has a pond three newer units. There are 2025s. And yeah, she was willing to sell or finance it. I threw a number out there and she countered slightly and yeah, we’re excited.

Ashley Kehr:So I have to ask, did she offer seller financing or did you ask her for it?

Kimber Rachuy:Well, when we first started talking, I was like, “Are you interested in doing that? ” Because she was talking about it. So yeah, and she just said yes. And then I really started getting serious about it because this would be a great opportunity for me to get into something else other than homes we buy and live in.

Ashley Kehr:That’s the thing. It never hurts to ask. One thing whenever I get face to face with sellers, and I think it’s harder to do this with agents when there’s agents being the middleman and you’re playing telephone back and forth, but when you ask the seller, “Are you interested in doing seller financing?” And then they say, “No.” And then I always follow up with, “Oh, okay. I didn’t know if your account or CPA had talked to you about the tax advantages of it. ” And it kind of just hopefully sounds a little alarm in their head and then they go off and talk to their accountant, their CPA and stuff. And there was this one guy recently that went to his accountant and talked about it and he’s like, “Okay, so I’ve got a plan. I’ll do these three first this year and then next year we’re going to do these ones and we’re going to sell or finance this and do this and everything.” It went and laid out this whole plan.So it never hurts to ask at all or to like, especially if their accountant or CPA is telling them to do seller financing because of the tax benefits coming from them, somebody they trust, then someone who’s trying to buy their property, it goes such a long way with them too.

Henry Washington:Wash, let’s do two things. First, Kimber, if you can just, for the Rickies who maybe haven’t heard of seller financing, just break it down for us and why is maybe seller financing more attractive than a bank loan? And then Ash, I would love to hear your perspective on what are the actual tax benefits that those sellers get. But Kimber, if you can start first, what is seller financing for someone that’s never heard of it before?

Kimber Rachuy:So seller financing pretty much is whoever the owner of the property is that you’re looking at or business. They’re willing to sell it to you by, essentially you may have to put a little bit down like cash to them and then they’re going to finance the rest of it for you. So you’ll just be paying the owner directly basically. And it’s super beneficial because one, you might not have to do as big of a down payment as you would if you use like a conventional loan. And the terms are a little bit more negotiable. With mine, I ended up doing a five-year balloon payment. So we’re going to do it at X percent for the five years. And then when the five years comes up, we’re going to review it and see if, hey, she wants to keep seller financing it. Do we want to change our terms?Or am I going to … Maybe I have something else I cashed out on that I can just pay her the lump sum or refinance it some other way.

Henry Washington:Well, those are the benefits to the seller, is that they’re getting the tax benefit, they’re getting the additional interest. And obviously for you as the buyer, the benefit is that you can kind of control your terms a little bit more, but there’s also some things that banks do, especially for Ricky investors that I think are somewhat helpful. They get an appraisal, right? There are certain inspections that need to be done. There’s a lot of paperwork involved. From a seller financing perspective, what are the things that Ricky’s need to watch out for that a traditional bank might normally protect them from?

Kimber Rachuy:Well, doing your own due diligence for sure. And I’ve already, luckily, the one girl that’s actually like a boss there, she’s getting into so many properties and hotels and stuff. She hooked me up with who she uses for inspections and who she uses for insurance. And she’s been able to connect me with a lot of contacts. So I’ll be getting inspections done and all of that good stuff on my own before we finally close and everything.

Henry Washington:We talked about finance and we talked about buying on different continents and we want to talk about some of the side hustles that Kimber also used to help her fund her first deals. And we’ll cover that right after we’re from today’s show sponsors. All right, we’re back here with Kimber. And Kimber, we talked about you buying on different continents. We talked about you using seller financing. What I want to talk about next is renting out your camper and your truck. Tell us how this started and was this like a calculated decision or something that just kind of happened spontaneously? Walk us through how you came to that decision that was right move for you.

Kimber Rachuy:Like I said earlier, I just like to kind of find ways for liabilities that we have to turn it into something that’s going to benefit our family more. So after we bought this camper, when I got out of the military, because we wanted to do camping, we were living in Utah at the time. There’s tons of beautiful parks around there. The first place we took it to as a family was to Yellowstone. We went to Moab, Bryce Canyon, all over the place, Zion. And obviously we’re not going to be using it every single weekend. So rather than it sitting in our gravel driveway, I was like, “I’m going to go ahead and list this. ” And I had it booked out consistently when we lived there.

Ashley Kehr:Kimber, where did you list it?

Kimber Rachuy:I listed it on Outdoorsy, RV Share, RV and Go. I think that’s it. And then I would post it on Marketplace with the links.

Ashley Kehr:Is there a property management software? For my short-term rental, I can link to VRBO, I can link to Airbnb and the Calendars sync. Do you have to manually do that on all these different websites for an RV?

Kimber Rachuy:They used to not have it where you could have an auto link. Now they do. So back when I first started it, I’d have to manually log into each site and then when someone would book, I’d go block it out on the other platform. That’s the only downside of it, but now it’s up to date.

Henry Washington:And just give us, if you remember, what are the quick numbers? How much could you rent this thing out for if someone booked it for a weekend?

Kimber Rachuy:I mean, it really depends on your size of your campers. So ours sleeps about eight people. It has a bunkhouse in it, which a lot of families like, and it’s a travel trailer, so it’s a bumper pool. So you don’t have to have the fifth wheel attachment in your truck to be able to do it. And all of it When I was doing it was people were just coming and picking it up. I didn’t do deliveries. So our unit was anywhere from $180 a night to $200 a night. It really just depends on the time of the season. And rented out a lot. We’d do discounts if it was a week or so or a little bit longer. And yeah, just they’d rent it out. What I did to help with it was I had a special rental agreement that I would have the renters sign in conjunction with whatever they signed on the platform to just cover ourselves.And they also had to watch our YouTube video on how everything works because we would always get people that showed up and they’ve never even looked at a camper before. So you want them to get a little bit of a sense of, okay, this is how this works. So when they’d come pick it up, we’d do a little intro of everything and make sure they know everything’s in working order and that they have all of the info they need to go back to if they’re out in the middle of nowhere with no service.

Henry Washington:And did you finance the camper or did you pay cash for-

Kimber Rachuy:Since I was in the military, sometimes when you reenlist, you get reenlistment bonuses. And I swear the Air Force has been so good to my family. We just get blessings sometimes. And when you reenlist, our career field, we were both aircraft mechanics and they’re really short man sometimes. So I got a reenlistment bonus prior to that when I reenlisted. So we used that chunk to kind of go ahead and pay for the camper.

Henry Washington:Man. So you didn’t have really any monthly expenses on this aside from insurance. So all that cost coming back was almost majority profit.

Kimber Rachuy:Yeah, basically.

Ashley Kehr:Well, Kimber, during this time, all of this stuff that you’re doing, you’re also pursuing your PhD. So what does that look like, building your portfolio, starting these different ventures and pursuing a PhD? How do you make time for it all?

Kimber Rachuy:I stay up late. I have a supportive husband, so he helps me out. And when we were overseas in England, I utilize for any veterans out there, I really utilized the education benefits that we get. And I use my post nine eleven GI bill, and now I’m using the vocational rehab program to do my PhD. So I kind of just try to make time for it every night. I dedicate on getting on my computer and following up on what homework I have for my classes and periodically checking in on my tenants and everything else we have. I kind of have my own little routine just to make sure I’m up to date on everything.

Ashley Kehr:Well, Kimbert, thank you so much for joining us today and to sharing your lessons learned, your journey, and congratulations on your accomplishments. Can you let everyone know where they can reach out to you and find more information about what you’re doing?

Kimber Rachuy:F-I-N-D-E-R Investments, and you should be able to find me. If not, you can search my name, Kimber Rachy, R-A-C-H-U-Y. Well,

Ashley Kehr:Kimber, thank you so much for joining us today. We’ve really appreciated you taking the time to come onto the show and to all our rookie listeners. Thank you so much for joining us every week, three times a week to listen to the show. I’m Ashley. He’s Tony, and we’ll see you guys on the next episode.