Month: October 2025

• Savvy investors use 1031 exchanges to defer capital gains taxes by reinvesting in like-kind properties.
• Successful 1031 exchanges can increase cash flow and strengthen investment portfolios.
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When you sell a property for more than you purchased it, you’ll typically owe capital gains tax.

The amount depends on factors like how long you owned the property and your taxable income, but it could be as high as 37% if you sell within a year and trigger short-term capital gains.

However, IRC Section 1031 provides an exception, allowing investors to postpone paying tax on the gain if they reinvest the proceeds in similar property. Commonly known as a 1031 exchange, investors use the strategy to reinvest in more profitable properties and grow their wealth.

There are a few rules to consider: 1031 exchanges are intended for investment properties, not primary homes; you must exchange for another property that is similar or “like-kind,” which the IRS defines as “the same nature or character”; and you have a limited amount of time to complete the exchange.

As soon as you sell, the clock starts: You must identify your replacement property or properties (you can identify as many as three like-kind properties) in writing within 45 days of selling the first property. Then, you must close on the replacement property within 180 days of your initial property sale.

One investor BI spoke with attempted a 1031 exchange but ultimately abandoned it because he couldn’t meet the 180-day deadline.

While his failed 1031 experience may be “rare,” he said, “there are so many things that could delay a closing.”

BI spoke with three investors who successfully executed 1031 exchanges and have stronger portfolios as a result.

Jeff White and Suleyka Bolaños exchanged their worst-performing property and quadrupled their cash flow

The first property Jeff White and Suleyka Bolaños bought — a fourplex in Denver — was a piece of work.

Looking back, “we could have done a lot better,” said the couple, who retired in their 40s by buying one rental property a year.

Thanks to a 1031 exchange, they were eventually able to swap it for two better-performing assets.

“We listed the fourplex for sale, found a buyer, and then went under contract on that single-family large house and a condo,” said White. “We closed on the same day — three transactions — paid zero tax, and got rid of our worst property that only cash flowed, at that time, $400 a month maximum, to those two other properties.”

They rented each individual room in the single-family home and rented the condo to a Section 8 tenant, which more than quadrupled their cash flow, said White: “We went from $400 to $1,700 overnight.”

Nicole Shirvani traded in a duplex for two properties

Nicole Shirvani, a full-time psychiatrist, is using real estate to boost her savings and give herself the option to eventually scale back at work.

When she moved from Oregon to Florida in 2022 for a new job, the single mom swapped her Oregon duplex for two different properties closer to her new home: a beachside condo and a single-family home.

She started looking at exchange properties before listing the duplex to give herself plenty of time.

“Before you sell, try to have the replacement properties identified and line everything up,” she advised. “You don’t want to sell a house, not be able to find suitable properties, and be stuck, unable to invest that money into something.”

Shirvani, who has since added two short-term rentals in the Shenandoah Valley and a triplex in Lakeland, Florida, to her portfolio, plans to use the same strategy as she continues scaling.

Zeona McIntyre upgraded from a small property to a multifamily that produced stronger cash flow

Zeona McIntrye is financially independent thanks to her real estate portfolio, but when she first started investing in her 20s, she couldn’t qualify for a mortgage. She didn’t have strong savings or a consistent income to show a mortgage lender.

It forced her to get creative for her first purchase — a one-bedroom condo in Boulder, Colorado that she financed with private lending — and introduced her to numerous nontraditional real-estate strategies. She used a home equity line of credit to buy her second property, which she later traded in for a quadplex using a 1031 exchange.

“A 1031 exchange allows you to defer your tax burden; a lot of people think, ‘Oh, I don’t pay any taxes,’ but you’re technically kicking the can down the road,” she explained. “The cool thing, though, is that you can do unlimited 1031 exchanges and infinitely kick it down the road. And then when you pass away, if you pass that on to someone else, like your children or a family member, the inherited home does not have the tax burden anymore. So it dies with you.”

• LinkedIn’s VP of engineering said technical skills alone aren’t enough for software engineers.
• She said soft skills, like collaboration and problem solving, are equally important.
• The VP added that job seekers should showcase projects to demonstrate applied learning.

For many recent graduates with limited work experience and small professional networks, finding that first full-time job can feel daunting.

In a field like software engineering, standing out from hundreds of other applicants can feel especially challenging as AI coding tools take on work that used to belong to entry-level hires.

This concern is top of mind for LinkedIn’s VP of engineering for talent solutions, Prashanthi Padmanabhan. The VP told Business Insider that in the current job market, “technical skills don’t cut it.” While technical expertise remains “core” to the job and areas like LLM development and cloud applications are rising in importance, software engineers need to demonstrate they can bring more to the table.

The VP said highlighting soft skills and side projects will help candidates stand out in a crowded market.

The importance of soft skills

Padmanabhan said that soft skills are key to being an effective software engineer.

“You need to learn how to collaborate with different people, like a product manager, a UX designer, a marketer, to take your idea from concept to completion,” Padmanabhan said.

The executive pointed to LinkedIn’s “Skills on the Rise in Engineering” report, a data-backed ranking based on what companies are increasingly hiring for. At the top of the list is large language model development and application — but the next three are soft skills: people management, agile problem solving, AI strategy.

“Equally important are your soft skills, like critical thinking, problem solving, collaboration, and teamwork,” Padmanabhan said. “Like, how do you really think about user experience?”

Some executives say that entry-level candidates will take on higher-level types of work as AI automates simpler tasks. In software engineering, where AI tools are being adopted more quickly, that may translate to more engineers building products rather than focusing solely on code.

Demonstrating solo projects

Coursework and certifications can help showcase technical acumen — but you may need to go a step further in this job market to show you actually learned the skills, Padmanabhan said.

That’s why applicants should have some kind of project to show for the coursework or certification they learned, Padmanabhan said.

“When students are graduating, they’re not going to have a lot of on- the-job skills to show,” Padmanabhan said. “But what they can show us? How have they been up-skilling themselves?”

She said that side projects can boost a candidate’s chances by showing that they applied learnings from a certification program, academic degree, or course.

“If you don’t have the coding experience, but you have a brilliant idea in your head, just build something,” Padmanabhan said.

With AI tools handling more coding tasks, there’s a growing expectation that anyone can build out an idea. The executive said it’s becoming a part of the interview process for candidates to show off a concept that they brought to life. Padmanabhan said many students have a GitHub repository of projects they’ve built.

Padmanabhan said she’s had candidates send her surveys based on 100 peer interviews to demonstrate the reasoning behind their product idea. She said it’s important to validate your hypothesis from research before you start building. Then, you “continuously test and iterate,” she said.

“Showing how you go about building actually matters a lot, because that’s what happens in the real world,” Padmanabhan said. “We do user research. You do user experience studies.”

The executive said that once candidates have that kind of experience under their belt, they can use the interview to share more color about their journey.

• My husband and I live in a four-bedroom house with our three kids and two of their partners.
• Our household is busy and bustling; there isn’t a lot of extra space, but there’s always extra help.
• To stay grounded, I have incorporated self-care rituals into my routine.

My husband and I live in a four-bedroom, two-bath house with our three young adult children — ages 18 to 22 — and two of their significant others. This type of living arrangement has pros and cons.

The sink and trash cans are full every time you turn around, but there are also additional helping hands. Our driveway looks like a used car lot, but there is no shortage of people who can grab a gallon of milk on their way home. In many ways, it’s like living in a hostel where people come and go at all hours of the day and night. You share the same roof, but everyone lives very separate lives.

To be clear, this was never part of the grand life plan. But with the cost of living being what it is, my husband and I faced a choice: let our oldest son move out and live in his car with his girlfriend (which was their plan), or let them move in with us while they save for their own place. Then our future son-in-law joined the party so he could save dorm costs, finish college, and afford to tie the knot and move out by the end of the year.

In situations like this, where alone time exists only as a theoretical concept, self-care is no longer a luxury — it’s a matter of survival. I’ve integrated three self-care rituals into my lifestyle that, I believe, have kept me sane.

I get regular sunshine and movement

For me, sunshine and movement are essential. Daily walks are nonnegotiable as they reconnect me with nature and remind me that the world is bigger than my overflowing house. I find sanctuary in outdoor chores or carrying my laptop to the porch.

I have my smartwatch remind me if I haven’t stepped away from my computer in the last hour. When I get that buzz, I don’t just cycle the laundry — I step outside to water the plants, check the mail, or go for a walk.

Anything I can do to catch some extra sunshine is a good thing.

Off-duty nights and device-free breaks help me decompress

My second self-care ritual is setting intentional boundaries to safeguard my marriage. This includes weekly date nights that don’t bust the budget. We may share a homemade meal or lock ourselves away to watch a show together, and during these times, we consider ourselves “off-duty.” It’s just about disconnecting from the demands of the people living in our house and reconnecting with each other.

And, yes, sometimes life happens and we get interrupted by perceived emergencies, but we are more able to roll with the punches when we know another break is within reach.

As a special treat this year, we threw in a road trip. For six blissful days, we left our laptops at home, only checked our phones once each morning, and were otherwise completely off duty.

These breaks are not about ignoring family; they’re about protecting the partnership that will outlast our current living situation.

I find a safe place to vent

My third self-care ritual is releasing my own personal pressure valve by venting to someone. Without it, I get a little twitch in my right eyelid, and I get snappy. Eventually, something small, like a half-drank water bottle that was abandoned in the living room (again!), sets me off.

So I’ve learned to vent before that happens. This is often a conversation with my husband or a close friend around a campfire. Each session starts with a mutually agreed-upon question: Do you need advice, or are you just venting?

That simple question changes everything.

Having someone to listen releases the steam that is building inside me and allows me to breathe without the person listening feeling like they need to “fix” something.

I’ve built rest into family life

What all of these rituals have in common is that I intentionally integrate them into everyday life. I don’t hide that these things are requirements for my sanity. I say, “I can’t do that until after my walk,” or “I would love to do that with you, but tonight is my off-duty night. Does tomorrow work?”

The more I normalize these pauses, the more the household respects them. As a bonus, the consistent modeling of self-care encourages others to self-reflect on their own self-care needs.

In a busy home, carving out space for yourself is more of a mental game than a physical one. When I take these small but consistent steps, I notice that I’m calmer and kinder. I respond rather than react.

That’s not just better for me. It’s better for everyone.

• Annie Liao raised $1.75 million and moved from Australia to San Francisco to build her startup.
• She was attracted to the tech culture filled with ambitious and talented people.
• While she loves San Francisco, she said she has to leave every two months to ground herself.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Annie Liao, a 24-year-old startup founder based in San Francisco. It’s been edited for length and clarity.

After raising $1.75 million in the pre-seed round for my startup last year, I quit my job and moved from Australia to San Francisco to go all in as a solo founder.

The reality of being a solo founder has been a lot harder than I thought it would be. It can get lonely and difficult at times, but living with a built-in support system of other founders helps. We all uprooted our lives, left behind our loved ones, and moved here to build startups, so we think of each other like family.

Now I’m living in a hacker house, where our dining table is covered in laptops and monitors instead of flowers — and it’s one of the best decisions I’ve made.

My biggest reason for moving to San Francisco is the people

After raising the pre-seed funding for Build Club, an AI learning hub aimed at democratizing access to AI education, I now have a team of five who work around the world, but I live in San Francisco.

I’ve always wanted to live in San Francisco. It’s the beating pulse of AI, and there are so many insanely ambitious and talented people to be surrounded by.

You can literally walk into a coffee shop and end up in a two-hour deep dive conversation about AI agents or someone’s YC application. Everyone’s dreaming big, and you can feel that optimism in the air. It’s a nice place to build a startup.

There are pros and cons to living in San Francisco

What surprised me most about San Francisco was how generous people are with their time. It’s a real “pay it forward” culture, and people actually want to see each other win.

Of course, there are downsides. Some streets don’t feel safe, and the contrast between incredible wealth and deep struggle is hard to ignore. Plus, I think Australia has better healthcare and is just more chill.

Living in a hacker house has been really important

During a visit to San Francisco before I moved, I met the person who ran Mission Control, one of San Francisco’s oldest hacker houses, and she told me they had empty rooms available. I later moved there for my first few months in San Francisco.

I met three other founders there, and we decided to move into a more intimate place. We named our hacker house “The Stables” because it’s our place of stability in San Francisco and because it’s a breeding ground for unicorns. As a solo founder, I don’t have a cofounder to tell everything to, so living with other founders has been really important.

I’ve probably leaned on my housemates too many times, whether for emotional support or even to share an employee. We’ve had some really great moments together. The day before one of our launches, we stayed up late, and one of my roommates bought us food to celebrate.

What it’s like to live with other founders

We also cook for each other when possible or go out to dinner together. We’re all very time-poor and come home exhausted, so it’s convenient to be able to knock on someone’s door to ask if they want to grab dinner. Every Sunday, we even go on a hike together to step away from work and touch some grass, which is always a highlight of my week.

Our shared spaces definitely get messy, especially during busy periods, but we like to clean together. There’s also less privacy and quiet than if I lived alone, but it’s just nice to have people around.

Living with other founders has shown me that they have low moments like me

When I look at founders on social media, they often only show the highlights, but living with other founders has been very humanizing and comforting. For example, you might see online that a founder raised a successful pre-seed round, but in reality, they’re crying on the couch of the hacker house because an employee they really wanted said no.

I remember there was one time when all of us were having really rough weeks — one of us was fundraising their round, and everyone else was working until 1 a.m. every day. We were all locked in, and our laptops and monitors were everywhere.

I spend the day at a small office space or coffee shop

I usually wake up at 6:30 a.m. and spend my mornings doing deep work. My team is split across time zones, so my afternoons consist of calls with people in other regions. When I return home in the evening, I usually have more calls with team members who come online even later.

Then, my roommates and I might cook together or go for a walk around the park to de-stress. Most nights, we end by lighting candles in the living room, playing deep house music, and coworking until 12 or 1 a.m.

San Francisco pushes me to dream bigger, while Australia keeps me grounded

Most people in San Francisco are very tech-obsessed, so I don’t like to spend more than two months here at a time. I usually go back to Australia to spend time with my family and ground myself, or I go to a place like Bali, where there’s a focus on well-being.

The hardest part about being away from Australia is definitely the distance, both personally and professionally. Many of our early supporters and part of our team are still in Australia, and our customer base is split between there and the US.

My whole family’s back home. When my niece was born, I wish I could’ve just teleported back. However, the balance has helped me stay a bit more sane and appreciate both places more.

Do you have a tech relocation story to share? If so, please reach out to the reporter at tmartinelli@businessinsider.com.

Althea McBride’s Georgia home is an “Afro boho” oasis.

Her living room and hallway walls are painted black, acting as a dramatic background to her many African sculptures and art. The dining room’s burnt orange walls are decorated with vinyl records like Aretha Franklin’s “Knew You Were Waiting: The Best Of Aretha Franklin 1980-1998” to Kendrick Lamar’s “GNX.”

It’s been a year since McBride bought her home, and outside a few hiccups, like a wasp infestation and disputes over property lines, everything is looking exactly how she envisioned it — literally.

“I used Canva to help design some of it before I even moved into the house, just by looking online at the pictures that they had on Zillow,” McBride told Business Insider. “I was able to download those and remodel it how I wanted. So my living room is exactly how I pictured it.”

What she couldn’t picture years ago was being a homeowner. Growing up in Los Angeles, homeownership was not something that she thought would be possible at 34 years old — and if she stayed in Los Angeles, it still might not be.

A financial incentive to move from California to Georgia helped McBride, now 35, decide to leave Los Angeles — although it didn’t take that much convincing. She was tired of the big city’s fast-paced lifestyle and slow-moving traffic and was looking for an out.

McBride applied to a remote-worker incentive program offered by Columbus, Georgia, a city in the western part of the state that borders Alabama. She received $5,000 in cash, as well as a range of other perks like a one-year membership to the Columbus Aquatics Center and a coffee date with the mayor.

Getting a little extra cash to move to a smaller city with a lower cost of living enabled McBride to become a homeowner for the first time. She’s enjoying decorating and living in her own house, and has grown accustomed to Southern culture and the area’s slower pace of living.

After following the ups and downs of McBride’s move in a series of interviews over the course of her first year in Columbus, she told me that overall, she’s pleased with her decision.

“I don’t really miss California — not yet,” she said.

Finally a homeowner

McBride didn’t expect to become a homeowner in her 30s. “I had the typical millennial experience: Went to college, had high student loan debt, and then I went through back-to-back layoffs. I was like, ‘What am I going to do?'”

At the time, she was working as a senior paid search manager for a marketing agency and living in Woodland Hills, Los Angeles — a neighborhood one exit shy of where the Kardashians live — and paying $3,400 a month for a two-bedroom apartment.

McBride didn’t need to know all the intricacies of buying a house to quickly realize that it would have been hard to make it work in Woodland Hills, where the median sale price was about $1.2 million in August 2024. Still, she tried saving money for a down payment to buy in California, but it wasn’t enough — and she didn’t qualify for much assistance because her salary was too high. So she started looking for places to live outside California, such as upstate New York and Virginia.

Though McBride graduated from Spelman College in nearby Atlanta and has family in Columbus, Georgia, the small city with a population of about 207,000, was never on her radar as a place to live.

“I was talking to my baby cousin, DJ, and he kept saying, ‘You should come to Columbus, cousin,'” McBride said. “I’m like, ‘What am I going to do in Columbus?'”

It wasn’t until she saw the incentive program go viral on social media that she considered it.

“I looked at it and I was like, ‘Well, this is perfect,'” McBride said. “If it’s meant to be, I’ll apply and hear back from them — and that’s exactly what I did.”

That was March 2024. That May, she learned she’d been accepted to the program. In August 2024, she closed on a three-bedroom home for $175,000. Now, McBride’s mortgage costs her about $1,500 a month — less than half of her rent in LA.

The benefits of living in Columbus aren’t just financial. Her home has more space for her to enjoy her hobbies, one of which is growing her own food. In California, McBride made it work by growing produce on her patio using storage bins with holes cut in the bottom for drainage. However, if she ever wanted to expand that operation, she would need more room — and a bigger budget.

“In California, you’ve got to have the money. The homes are $500,000-plus, but you don’t get the yardage. You don’t get the land like that. So it makes it kind of hard.”

McBride never dreamed of having a greenhouse, let alone a place to put it. But in Georgia, she has plans to build one on her property. She’s already growing lettuce, blueberries, bananas, red and white onions, peppers, and eggplants, and hopes to plant even more.

If she has to put in a little elbow grease to make the home and the yard her own, so be it.

“I went in with the intention that I might have to put work into a home,” McBride said. “I may have to get in there with a hammer. I may have to get in there with some paint and fix it up the way that I want to, but at least I have that.”

Settling in to small-city life

For the first few months after moving, McBride frequently traveled to Atlanta — a nearly two-hour drive from Columbus — and used it as a crutch for social activities and shopping. (Her nearest Trader Joe’s, she noted, is in Atlanta). Although she still travels to Atlanta occasionally, now that she’s established her community in Columbus, she’s found more to do closer to home. She joined the Urban League of the River Valley as well as the Columbus chapter of the National Council of Negro Women.

“I’ve been doing all the community service events. We’ve been going to different galas. We’ve been going to all types of stuff out here in Columbus,” she said. “Every time I meet somebody random, they either know my family, they either all go to the same churches, or they grew up with each other. Everyone knows each other or knows of somebody, which is very helpful when trying to get to know people out here.”

The way McBride sees it, that $5,000 cash incentive wasn’t what convinced her to move 2,000 miles across the country, though it was a nice sweetener that helped cover her closing costs and moving expenses. It was more so the program’s promise of activities and community-building opportunities that helped lighten the social burden of moving to a new city.

“For me, the cash incentive is reimbursement — that’s like icing on the cake,” McBride said. “With this, you’re not just moving. Now it’s like there are some activities I can look forward to, there are things where I’ll be able to go out there and just meet completely different people with different backgrounds and really get a head start on my personal Columbus community.”

She’s attended program-sponsored events such as dinners with other program members and coffee with the mayor, B.H. “Skip” Henderson III, who mapped out a vision for what Columbus could look like in the future.

Now, McBride said she sees herself in that vision.

“I’m happy with my decision,” she said. “My goal is to stay here for a couple of years at least.”