Leif Jonasson just recently became a homeowner, but that’s not all: he became a landlord, too. In less than a year, the 28-year-old mechanical engineer went from living in an apartment in St. Paul with roommates to buying a duplex in Minneapolis and renting out the bottom floor to a couple. “It made sense to me to have half of the mortgage be paid by somebody that was living in half of my house [with] a wall separating us,” Jonasson told Fortune.
It’s a new experience for him—to say the least. Since he lives there himself, he said, he has an even more vested interest in maintaining the home, and he’s learning a lot about that. “Whenever something goes wrong, it’s a little bit of a crash course and figuring out how to best solve it,” he said.
Still, his tenants are essentially his neighbors and vice versa, which makes for an interesting situation with different responsibilities. In some ways, he says he’s had to pull back financially because it always feels like there’s something to fix or another bill coming due. As we finished up our phone call, he said he was going to the hardware store because there was yet another thing he had to fix—and trips to the hardware store can get expensive, he added. He now has to budget around landlord expenses coming down the pike. For example, Jonasson has to get a new water heater, and the installation price isn’t cheap.