6 Years on an Army Cot, and the 14 Investments It Turned Into

I slept on a green canvas army cot for 6 years as a kid.

We didn't start out that way. When I was 5 we lived in a nice home in Greenville, Texas. My dad ran a successful trailer manufacturing company and my mom was a Safeway store manager. Then came the move to Dallas, my dad's day trading, and the Black Monday crash of 1987. Most of the fortune was gone.

They scraped together what was left, bought dirt cheap land in East Texas, and parked a used single-wide mobile home at the end of a 6 mile rock road. My room was about the size of a closet. Hence the cot.

Everyone worked. I fed animals before school every morning. While other kids went to summer camp, I built fences and barns, and in the winter I chopped and delivered firewood.

From about age 8 to 12 I was dead set on becoming a neurosurgeon. The reasoning was airtight for a kid: they make a lot of money, and I never wanted to sleep on a cot again.

The ranch gamble eventually paid off. By 15 we were back in the nicest home in the county, 7,000 square feet, bedrooms to spare. Riches to rags to riches. What stuck with me: my parents' net worth looked great right up until it didn't.

That's probably why I stopped using net worth as my North Star. (I chased it for years. I get it.) Assets swing, and bad times are exactly when you're forced to sell. On that ranch, the firewood we sold mattered more than anything on paper.

So when I left my corporate role in August 2025, I built for cash flow first. Today I have 14 different cash flow sources across self storage, apartments, short-term rentals, private lending, and yes, mobile home parks. (The irony isn't lost on me.) These aren't dividend stocks, they are real assets with predictable cashflow.

Nobody asks about the cot

They ask about the 14.

So here's the whole list. I pulled every line from a wealth tracker I built for myself, because none of the five finance apps I was paying for could handle a dozen entities and a stack of K-1s.

Three ground rules before the table. Sizes are relative, not dollars, because the ratios are the useful part and my bank balance isn't. Yield means cash that actually hit my account over the last full cycle of payments, divided by cash I actually put in: 4 distributions for a quarterly payer, 12 for a monthly one. Where a position is too new to have thrown off a full cycle, the number is marked "est." Those are projections, and you should read them as a different kind of number than the ones above them.

The third one is the column most people skip. Depreciation shelters the income from the real assets, so most of this arrives federally untaxed. Assume a 30% effective rate, round numbers, and a dollar here is worth about a dollar and forty of salary. The last column grosses those yields up (divide by 0.70, the same arithmetic a muni fund uses) to answer the only question that actually matters: what would a paycheck have to pay me to land the same money in my account?

Three lines don't get that treatment and I've marked them. Loan interest and fund carry are ordinary income, and no amount of building depreciation shelters them.

Four things jump out at me, and the first one is the whole reason I wrote this.

The boring ones are the firewood. Mobile home parks, an RV park, self-storage, a rental house in a town most people can't find on a map. None of it is interesting at a dinner party. All of it pays somewhere between 7% and 14%, monthly or quarterly, and has for years without asking me for anything. That's the same shape as the firewood we sold off that ranch: unglamorous, small, and it shows up every month whether or not the market is having a good year. I didn't set out to rebuild my childhood in a spreadsheet. I did it anyway.

The two I run myself are the two still proving themselves. I bought the Florida short-term rental intending to convert the garage into a fifth bedroom. What I didn't plan for was 9 months of waiting on the city to approve the permit. I shut the rental down for all of June to finally get the conversion done, and the week it went live as a 5-bedroom I started taking bookings a year out. The 4-bedroom version was doing mid single-digit returns. I'm optimistic about what this one does now, and optimistic is still an estimate.

The other awesome thing about the short-term rental: it's the one on this list that can block W-2 income from being taxed. So the first 8 months I worked in 2025 were completely tax free from a federal perspective, entirely because of this investment. That's not included in the table because the returns would look ridiculous.

The Texas strip center came with 6 tenants, and one of them bought out the last 2 years of their lease and prepaid a year up front. That has me sitting well ahead of my 10% projection right now, on the assumption I can get someone into that space inside a year. Should be doable. Nothing is guaranteed.

The 2025 vintages are estimates, and I'd rather say that than bury it. Those are funds, and a fund's first year rarely throws off much; the cash starts streaming in year two. So those rows carry the sponsors' projections instead of money that's landed, and the jury is genuinely still out on how this batch performs. Showing you a labeled estimate beats leaving the rows blank, and it beats quietly annualizing one early distribution into a number that would flatter me.

The cleanest line on the table has an asterisk. The hard-money loan went out, paid 10% monthly, and came back whole. No K-1, no capital calls, no operator updates, no permits. The asterisk is that it's the one line the taxman gets a full bite of, so on an after-tax basis it lands below the mobile home parks it beats on paper. My 8-year-old self would find it deeply uninteresting, and my 43-year-old self would do it again tomorrow.

The honest read on all of this: the portfolio isn't beating anything. Most of these numbers sit between 7% and 10%, which is respectable and not remarkable, right up until you put them next to a paycheck. A 7% sheltered yield is a 10% salary or stock dividend. The 13.6% one is a 19.4% tax adjusted return, and I don't know where you'd buy that consistently year after year.

What all of them are is arriving, in cash, on a schedule, whether or not I'm working, and whether or not the market agrees with me this quarter. That was the entire design goal, and it's the only reason the next paragraph is true.

This cashflow ballast is what lets me explore new ventures like building software startups with AI. To further close the gap between our cashflow and our burn rate, we even moved the family from San Diego to Sacramento area. We now have family nearby and a 30% drop in costs.

I definitely miss the southern California weather. But I sleep much better at night. After 6 years on a cot, I don't take that lightly.