3 Kids, Full-Time Job, $2M Portfolio: This Single Mom Did It in 6 Years!

**Henry Washington** (0:00)
A single mom with three kids builds a multimillion-dollar rental portfolio while working a full-time job. You have to hear this one.
Six years ago, Rachel Duck was freshly divorced, a single parent of three kids. She needed a safe, low-money-down strategy to start building wealth. The answer, a method that 99 percent of people will never try, but they should.
Rachel used 5 percent down owner-occupied loans to build a portfolio of 10 properties. She fixed them up, she rented them out, and made huge equity along the way. Did we mention that she worked a 9 to 5 while doing this? Now, she's grown her net worth to over 2 million, making her financially free. Rachel is breaking down her buy box, including the exact property she targets, the loans she uses to fund them, and the uncomfortable truth that made her a self-made millionaire. She had three kids and a full-time job, so why can't you do this too?
What's going on, everybody? I'm Henry Washington, co-host of the Bigger Pockets Podcast. And today, I'm bringing you the story of investor Rachel Duck from Austin, Texas. Let's jump into the conversation.
Rachel Duck, welcome to the Bigger Pockets Podcast.

**Rachel Duck** (1:13)
Thank you so much. Thanks for having me.

**Henry Washington** (1:15)
Awesome. We are glad to have you. Excited to get started. So as we do that, why don't you tell us a little bit about your background and how you first got into real estate?

**Rachel Duck** (1:23)
Well, so I've been in real estate as an investor, as a sales agent, as a consultant since 2006, really. I started buying some raw land in college, and then bought my first duplex, which ended up being a house hack without knowing what a house hack was, and then just kind of kept going from there. Now I have a portfolio of mostly long-term rentals. I've got a short-term rental, which I'm in right now, but that's been how I've grown over the years.

**Henry Washington** (1:51)
That's cool. And what part of the country are you in?

**Rachel Duck** (1:53)
I'm in Central Texas, so the doomed Austin market.

**Henry Washington** (1:57)
Awesome. So you said in college, you bought a duplex?

**Rachel Duck** (2:00)
Well, so in college, I bought some raw land.
And then right after grad school, I graduated from A&M. There's a Master of Real Estate Finance. I wanted to be a developer, but I graduated in 2009

**Henry Washington** (2:14)
Yeah.

**Rachel Duck** (2:15)
And there wasn't a lot being developed for someone wanting to be a developer. So my program director is like, maybe you think of some other options. But I got into property tax work because that was something that was going on in the Austin market in 2009
And I also bought my first Duplex. So in 2009, things were pretty cheap. I was just out of college and I bought a massive fixer-upper outside of Austin, that I just did myself, jumped into it, learned a lot, learned a lot of lessons, mistakes, but it ended up being great.

**Henry Washington** (2:46)
So your first deal deal was a live-in flip house hack all rolled into one? All into one. Okay.

**Rachel Duck** (2:55)
And this is before I knew all those terms. I started listening to Bigger Pockets, I think like 2017, 2018, and started hearing people talk about that. I'm like, oh, I did that.

**Henry Washington** (3:04)
Yeah.

**Rachel Duck** (3:05)
But I had no idea what I was doing at the time, but it worked out okay. Mainly I had good timing. I got lucky with the market and then just learned how to do all the flip renovations and how to get tenets. This was when I was 23, so that was my first big one.

**Henry Washington** (3:22)
Okay. It seems like that live in flip strategy struck a chord with you because it seems like you've done it multiple times in your investing career.

**Rachel Duck** (3:33)
Yeah. I had the live in flip, the first one, took a little bit of a break from a lot of real estate investing. I got married, had three kids. My husband at the time wasn't crazy about it because we were doing all the work ourselves and we had little babies and it was a lot. So took a break in 2018
We moved into another home and then in 2020, I got divorced and decided, you know what? Just going to go all in on this that I know how to do. So from 2020 to now, we've moved. I was counting last night, nine times.

**Henry Washington** (4:05)
You and three kids.

**Rachel Duck** (4:07)