When my wife and I started looking to buy our first home together in early 2005, we had a vision of living in a single family home in a trendy area of Silicon Valley that was close to all of the city’s amenities and within biking distance to both of our jobs. Unfortunately, reality hit us hard in the form of sticker shock as we started seeing the prices of some of the homes in the area that we had set our hearts on. After using several mortgage calculators to understand how much these homes were going to cost us per month, we both knew that the mortgage payments would stretch our budget and leave very little money left for anything else. We considered buying lower priced condominiums in the area, but we knew that condominiums did not appreciate as well as single family homes. As we were about to give up our home search in despair, we passed by a duplex for sale and stumbled upon a well kept secret that neither our Realtor nor our Lender had told us about - rental income.