Tori Dunlap, the author and entrepreneur behind Her First $100,000, credited renting with helping her grow her business and reach multi-millionaire status.
“One of the best financial decisions I ever made was not buying property,” she told CNBC Make It in 2024.
Although she could have afforded to buy property earlier and almost bought a condo outside of Seattle when she was 22, renting made more sense for her lifestyle. She traveled often for work, and the house she had almost purchased would have required her to spend about three hours a day traveling in and out of town. At 27, she put all of her belongings into storage and spent the year traveling the world, which would have been much more difficult if she had owned a home at the time.
“Every time I tried to consider becoming a homeowner by going through the process, I didn’t have the bandwidth,” she says. “(It) just wasn’t the right time. I was like, ‘OK, there’s a bunch of things I need to do for the company.'”
But that changed recently as the 31-year-old purchased her first home in the summer of 2025.
“I’m tired of someone else deciding where I’m going to live.”
From a financial standpoint, Dunlap had been in a position to purchase a home for some time. She had saved $100,000 by age 25 and had a net worth of millions of dollars by age 27, she said. But continuing to rent has allowed her to continue growing her business and traveling for extended periods of time without worrying about having to make a mortgage payment on top of a short-term rental stay, she says.
Earlier this year, however, the owner of his most recent rental put the property up for sale — a situation Dunlap had faced during a previous lease. Faced with the decision of finding another rental or embarking on home ownership, her broader life circumstances led her towards the latter solution.
“I was honestly tired of letting someone else decide where I was going to live every year, and I didn’t like that lack of stability,” she said in a recent episode of her podcast. She had been in a relationship for almost three years and things were going well. This security has changed her way of thinking: “I want to be able to decide when I leave, when I stay and what I want my life to look like,” she said.
“And that’s when I was like, ‘OK, I think it’s time. I think it’s time to buy a house.'”
“I am now a multi-millionaire and in debt”
The house Dunlap chose was less a financial decision than an emotional one. She wasn’t trying to find the property that would offer the best return on investment or be the most affordable option, but rather one that would feel like home to her, an example of her broader philosophy on how people should view financial decisions and wealth creation.
“I want personal finance and money to be a tool,” she says. “You don’t want it to be the thing that makes or breaks a decision for you…don’t buy the house if you don’t see yourself in it, if you don’t feel like you’re in a place that really feels like you. It doesn’t matter how good the investment is.”
Still, she used her financial expertise to take a strategic approach to how she purchased her home.
Dunlap had planned to buy a house with cash, but when she found the house she wanted, the price was slightly more than she wanted to pay, she said. However, she “was in the financial position of not only going over budget, but also thinking differently about how I was going to afford this house,” she said on the podcast.
Ultimately, she made a “gambling decision”: get a mortgage on her house and put about 60 percent down, she says. The house needed plumbing repairs for which it was initially estimated to cost around $50,000. Even though she found a contractor to do the work at a considerably lower price, the example provided a good example of why it’s smart for new owners to maintain cash reserves.
“For the first time in five years, I am now a multi-millionaire in debt,” she says. “I think it surprises a lot of people, that debt can be used as leverage and as an asset, because I don’t want to tie up money that I don’t have to tie up…I wanted to think about protecting my money and using debt intelligently.”
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