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19 Year Old Teen Buys a House With Hogs


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Business News: Lindsay Binegar

Now here's a girl who can really bring home the bacon! Lindsay Binegar, now 19 and a freshman at Ohio University - Chillicothe campus, has just purchased a four-bedroom, two-bathroom, two-car garage house. Who really saves up for college anymore?

But Lindsay isn't a bank manager's nightmare; in fact, she's been quite financially savvy since age 4, when she won her first $100 by showing a hog she had raised. Since then, she began a sort of 'hog fund', raising a few every year on the family's Highland County farm, entering them at local competitions and putting any winnings straight to her savings account.

Who knew that that such a delicious animal could be so bankable? In the recent years, Lindsay has amassed $15,540 from showing grand champion hogs at county fairs, and when she graduated from Greenfield McClain High School last June, she had saved more than $40,000, reports The Columbus Dispatch.

Her goal was to ultimately put that money towards college, but her parents, whether being equally clever with money or just fearing an empty nest, proposed to pay for college if she commuted to school and put her vast nest egg towards another investment. A naturally frugal individual, she accepted, and it wasn't long before her father, Gary Binegar, who conveniently runs Binegar Auction Service, suggested she buy a house. Just a couple months later in August, a house went up for auction as part of an estate sale. Lindsay purchased it, in cash, for $40,000. Characteristically, she's smartly renting out the place to a great aunt and uncle for $450 a month, the profits of which she'll put toward a wedding and yet another dream home for the future.

Her father's claim that Lindsay has "got a really good head on her shoulders... she's the perfect girl" is hardly an exaggeration. Consistently an academic shining star, she has dreams of becoming a teacher and volunteers each Friday at an elementary school. Involved with the youth organization responsible for her prosperity, 4-H, for 11 years now, Binegar also enjoyed a popular adolescence as cheerleader, and homecoming queen in her senior year of high school. Interestingly, her keen eye for investment seems to run in the family, as her father had also bought a house when he got out of high school, though with not as much success. "I paid $7,000 and there was 3 feet of snow in the living room," he says. However, not to be deterred, he flipped the house then sold it to buy the farm where he, his wife, and Lindsay now reside.