Make It – Real Estate
36-year-old lives and travels in her truck full-time, spends $1,305/month: ‘I’m comfortable in very small spaces’
In 2019, Ashley Kaye took a scuba diving trip to Honduras that changed the course of her life. On that trip, Kaye met someone who travels full-time, and the conversation they had helped her realize she wanted to leave her career and life in Wisconsin behind and continue traveling. “He told me he wished he […]
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Look inside: Couple bought a chateau in France for $835,000, spent over $300,000 turning it into a bed and breakfast
After years of living in San Francisco, California natives Malana Moberg, 59, and Roland Salvato, 64, were ready for a change. Salvato had spent approximately 30 years working as a project manager, while Moberg worked as a marketing consultant. After a stint running their own company, The RoMa Group, they decided to the countryside to […]
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36-year-old travels the world in a Toyota Tacoma: After 3 years on the road, this is her No. 1 takeaway
In 2015, Ashley Kaye’s father died and she inherited her childhood home in Waterford, Wisconsin. At the time, she was 27 years old, working in corporate healthcare and transitioning to a consulting job, where she worked 80 to 100 hours a week. “I worked from home, so I just walked from my bedroom to my […]
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Couple bought a homestead for $390,000, spent $13,000 on DIY renovations: Their No. 1 takeaway after a year on the land
In 2023, Sophie Hilaire Goldie, 37, and Rocky Goldie, 50, had just finished converting a friend’s Home Depot shed into a tiny home and were ready to start looking for their own place together. “If it wasn’t for meeting her, I probably would have ended up in a little shack,” Rocky tells CNBC Make It. […]
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Look inside: We spent $64 million turning an old Virginia prison into an apartment complex— ‘it’s important to preserve history’
From 1910 to 2001, the Liberty Crest Apartments were known as the Lorton Reformatory, a prison in Lorton, Virginia that housed inmates from Washington, D.C. It is more widely known as the site where many suffragists were held after the Silent Sentinels pickets at the White House in 1917. And according to the Library of […]
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Look inside: 33-year-old pays $3,100 a month to live in an old bank turned apartment in Montreal—’it was a beautiful blank canvas’
Marianne Plaisance, 33, and her boyfriend had been looking to buy a house in Montreal, Québec, Canada, for about two years. In 2022, Plaisance came across an online listing for a three-bedroom, two-bathroom condo located inside an old bank. The apartment was 3,500 square feet, split between the first floor and a basement. “The first […]
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29-year-old couldn’t afford a house in the U.S., so she bought one sight unseen in Italy: ‘I plan to use it like a retirement plan’
Ohio native Lauren Scott, 29, had lived in Los Angeles for 10 years working as a freelancer in the film industry, when she decided she was ready to buy a house. At the time, Scott lived in a studio apartment and paid $1,175 in rent. Scott started her search in 2019 and wanted to stay […]
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Couple relocated from America to Switzerland and pay $2,883 a month for their 3-bedroom apartment: ‘The safety level is so different here’
When Mary Braun met her husband Sébastien, they were both living in Chicago. But on their second date, Sébastien, a France native, told Braun he wasn’t planning on staying in the United States for much longer — he had been in America for 15 years and wanted to move back to Europe soon. “He actually […]
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Family’s abandoned train car turned Airbnb brings in up to $110,000 a year: ‘Our dreams were surpassed’
In 2020, Isaac French, 27, and his family purchased a train car that had been sitting abandoned on a neighbor’s farm in Deary, Idaho. They paid just $3,000. Train car number 306 was built in the 1900s and originally ran on the Washington Idaho & Montana Railway from 1909 until the 1950s. When the family got […]
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33-year-old pays $2,100/month to live with 23 roommates in Brooklyn—take a look inside
In a city as notoriously expensive as New York, it’s common to see people in their late 20s and early 30s living with roommates to help manage the high cost of living. But Ishan Abeysekera has taken that to the next level with his current living situation in Brooklyn: a communal building that he shares […]
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