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Almost nobody who buys their first short-term rental does it with cash they had lying around. We did not. We had a house with equity in it and a HELOC, and that is the only reason there was ever a door one. This guide finds your version of that.
The problem
Most people decide they cannot start based on one number: what is in their savings account. That number is almost never the real number. Equity in a house you already own. A 401(k) from a job you left. A Roth you have been contributing to for nine years. A spare room. A property you could lease instead of buy.
Each of those has a cost, a risk, and a set of rules attached, and most of them are nothing like what people assume. Some are far more accessible than you would guess. Some will wreck you if you touch them wrong.
This guide walks through every source, what it actually costs to use, what the rules are, and the order to consider them in. Then it hands you a prompt that runs the audit on your own situation and produces a written Capital Inventory you can act on.
What is inside
Savings, home equity and HELOCs, retirement accounts, a spare room, partners, seller financing, and the on-ramps that need no purchase at all. What each one is genuinely good for and who it is wrong for.
What you can and cannot do with a 401(k) and a Roth, how a HELOC is actually underwritten, and the mistakes that turn an accessible source into a tax bill. This is the part I spent nine years around.
Sequence matters more than people expect. The same three moves in a different order can cost or save you real money, and one of them is close to irreversible.
Copy it into Claude or ChatGPT and it interviews you, then produces a written Capital Inventory: what you can access, what it costs, which on-ramp fits, and what to do first. This is the piece I was not willing to give away free.
Who this is for
If you have been reading about short-term rentals for months and stopped every time at the down payment, this is the thing standing between you and a real plan. It is not motivation. It is an accounting exercise with rules attached.
If you already know exactly how you are funding your first deal, skip it. Go get the free deal analyzer instead and start underwriting.
After you run it
The audit produces a document. For $97 I will read it before we meet and spend thirty minutes on Zoom telling you what I would actually use, what I would leave alone, and whether the sequence holds up. That is the Hidden Capital Audit review, and it is the natural next step from this guide.