Before I get into my update on crypto and vacation rental investments let me say Merry Christmas. Usually, I’d be going to breakfast with my wife and kids to my wife’s aunt Bella’s house but my allergies started acting up yesterday. Since we travel next week to Athens Greece and because I’m also allergic to cats (there’s a cat at aunt Bella’s) I’m not going to breakfast. I also did not go to the Christmas party at Jeri’s, a friend of ours, last night who has dogs but I’d rather be safe than sorry. I do not need an excuse for not making our trip next week.
Crypto
I do have a few things to mention on the topic of crypto. I’ve been researching crypto mining as a passive source of income and as a way to get more crypto. I’ve looked into Bitcoin ASIC miners but at the moment most are priced greater than $12,000. That’s a lot giving the hardware you get for that amount of money. I’d say recent supply shortages due to supply chain issues and the rise in demand have driven the price a bit higher than I’d like to shell out right now.
Presearch
Since ASIC hardware miners aren’t cheap I decided to look into mining crypto that did not require an ASIC to be competitive. I found a few options like Strong Block, Flux, Ring Financial, and Weave Financial which don’t require me needing to buy physical hardware. These options only require you to stake some crypto with each option requiring its specific crypto and amount.
Out of each option, I choose to go with Presearch and Weave Financial. I went with Presearch because the token cost was really low compared to the others and because I could earn tokens by running nodes, they have a usable product, and one service. The product is a decentralized search engine and the service it has is ads. The ads service only requires staking at the moment but at some point, I think they’ll monetize ad clicks.
So I bought some Pre, configured three (3) VPS servers as Pre nodes, and staked some of my Pre, 2000 each node, so I could earn some Pre. Each server costs roughly $5 a month to run so at minimum I’d like to earn enough Pre to pay for the hosting costs and break even. Lastly, I used some of the Pre I had leftover to stake some ad words on Presearch’s search engine. The ads point to affiliate links that if clicked could possibly get me something there.
Weave Financial
The other option, Weave Financial or Weave, is a DeFi platform that brings expert yield farmers together with less experienced investors looking to make passive returns from cryptocurrency. Weave Financial does not have an available at the time of this writing but has two offerings Weave Pro and Weave Passive. Weave is also not a token or coin that can be bought on any exchange at the time of this writing.
With this option, I had to stake some BUSD to earn Weave token. The amount of and longer I stake BUSD the more Weave I earn. Weave is a riskier option when compared to Presearch since there is no product available. But I’m hopeful that once the products are released they’ll be well received and we’ll see some token price appreciation.
Summary
Investing in crypto is risky. These investments are interesting. I use Presearch and I’ve installed it on all my devices replacing DuckDuckGo. I consider these like startups so my plan for these crypto projects is to hold them long-term, at least a year or more so.
Vacation Rental
Since the timing of this post is late in the month of December I think it’s fitting to show some numbers from my short-term rental experiment I started this year.
Let’s recap. Earlier this year one of my goals was to try running short-term vacation rentals. I took two (2) of my long-term rental properties and changed over to short-term rentals as their lease expired. I also leased a home that was a long-term rental from its owner for five(5) years and made it into a vacation rental.
I had never done it before but I did a lot of research into what it took and all the different ways I could’ve approached it. Now let’s get into how this year went.
Total Monthly Profits for 2021
Total monthly profits are gross income minus online travel agency expenses for Airbnb, VRBO, and Booking.com.
Net Profits for 2021
The Net Profits are calculated below. This takes the total profits and subtracts the total expenses.
July and December ended up being the most profitable months of the year. July was more profitable than December even though I had more properties to rent. Can’t wait to see how it does next year with all three properties online.
One thing to note is that these numbers don’t show the cost to furnish the properties. The first-year profit easily paid off all the expenses for furniture and amenities for all three properties. This means next year’s profits get to go into my pockets instead of paying for startup costs.
Since the typical long-term rental profits are roughly $200 to $400 dollars a month, I’d say the returns from doing short-term vacation rentals makes sense given my results.
Summary
The next step for me is to outsource the cleaning. I did everything this year to start so I got the full experience of what it takes. The downside is that I have a full-time job and the extra work while doable for the most part forced me to block off certain days or impose gaps in my booking schedule. I’ve already outsourced the cleanings for this December and so far so good. Each cleaning is $110 so my goal is to make sure the number of turnovers is minimal while increasing occupancy. I don’t see this being a problem but we’ll see.
