Legal & Accounting services

[Felix Badillo]

Hi there,

Thank you for the great advice thus far. Excuse my ignorance, but my business/investing partner and I are both physicians that have just started our turnkey real estate investing journey. We have two properties in Indianapolis that we purchased through Norada (who have been excellent, btw). We are both newbies. 

We listen to The Passive Real Estate Investing podcast and heard good things about Anderson Advisors, who provide legal and accounting services. However, just in our first year we have spent $26,000 (!!) in fees. Granted, the service includes the following:

-Unlimited land trust set up for 7 years, unlimited LLC's for 7 years at a rate of $13,000 (for 7 years)

-3 years of accounting services includes personal and business at rate of $10,000

-However, we have annual fees of $995, monthly fees of $35, and state filing fees of $425 for each LLC that we set up. We have 4 LLC that we set up through them thus far.

Granted the first two services listed are for 7 yrs of legal etc and 3 years of accounting, but all of these fees seems prohibitively excessive.

How is everyone else doing it? I understand that it's important to do things the right way (i.e. professional tax services and protection through a good legal service), but are we in over our heads?

Thank you so much.

Felix & Paul

PS Anderson, has been an excellent resource, albeit expensive)

[Louise A.]

@Felix Badillo

Unfortunately that amount of legal/tax assistance is probably not needed as you're getting started out, but its great that you now have a platform on which to expand quickly.  Also, as you likely both have more assets than the average newbie RE investor, having more protection is probably wise. 

I started using Anderson myself (unlimited LLC package) after 6 years of investing and its been difficult to transition to the new structure. If I had started out with them it would have been much easier.

Don't beat yourself up on the expenditure.  Set some lofty acquisition goals and make the large upfront layout of cash make sense retroactively by building an awesome portfolio.  

Feel free to PM me with specific questions.

Good luck!