Tori Dunlap, the author and entrepreneur behind Her First $100k, has attributed renting to helping her build her business and achieve multimillionaire status.
“One of the best financial decisions I ever made was not buying property,” she told CNBC Make It in 2024.
Though she could have feasibly afforded to buy property earlier and almost did buy a condo outside of Seattle when she was 22, renting made more sense for her lifestyle. She was traveling often for work and the home she almost bought would have required her to spend roughly three hours a day commuting in and out of the city. At 27, she put all her belongings into storage and spent the year traveling the world, something that would have been much more difficult had she owned a home at the time.
“Every time I would even try to consider being a homeowner going through the process, I didn’t have the bandwidth,” she says. “[It] just wasn’t the right time. I thought, ‘OK, there’s a bunch of stuff that I have to do for the business.'”
But that changed recently as the 31-year-old bought her first home in the summer of 2025.
‘Sick of having somebody else decide where I was going to live’
From a financial perspective, Dunlap had been able to buy a home for some time. She had $100,000 saved by the time she turned 25 and had a multimillion dollar net worth by age 27, she says. But continuing to rent allowed her to keep building her business and enjoying traveling for long stretches without worrying about having to make a mortgage payment on top of a short-term rental stay, she says.
Earlier this year, though, the owner of her most recent rental listed the property for sale — a situation Dunlap had dealt with during a previous lease. Faced with the decision of finding another rental or taking the plunge into ownership, her broader life circumstances led her to the latter.
“I was frankly sick of having somebody else decide where I was going to live every single year, and I didn’t like that lack of stability,” she said on a recent episode of her podcast. She had been in a relationship for nearly three years and her business was going well. That security shifted her thinking: “I want to be able to make a decision of when I leave, when I stay, and what I want my life to look like,” she said.
“And that’s when I went, ‘OK, I think it’s time. I think it’s time to buy a house.'”
‘I’m now a multimillionaire with debt’
The home Dunlap chose was less a financial decision than an emotional one. She wasn’t trying to find the property that would provide the best return on investment or be the most affordable option, but rather the one that felt like home, an example of her broader philosophy on how people should view financial decisions and wealth-building.
“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 can’t see yourself there, if it doesn’t feel like someplace that actually feels like home. It doesn’t matter how good of an investment it is.”
Still, she used her financial expertise to be strategic about how she bought her home.
Dunlap planned to buy a home in cash, but when she found the house she wanted, it was a bit above the price she wanted to pay, she says. However, she “was in the financial position to not just go over my budget, but to actually think differently about how I was going to afford this house at all,” she said on the podcast.
In the end, she made a “game-time decision” to get a mortgage on her house and put about 60% down, she says. The house needed plumbing repairs for which she was initially quoted around $50,000. Though she found a contractor to do the work for considerably less, the instance provided a good example of why it’s smart for new homeowners especially to keep some cash reserves.
“For the first time in five years, I’m now a multimillionaire with debt,” she says. “I think that surprises a lot of people, that debt can be used as leverage and as an asset, because I don’t want to tie up the cash I don’t have to tie up … I wanted to think about protecting my cash and using debt in the smart way.”
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