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Brittany:

With the information you have hear, this looks like a solid first property.  Since you have almost $0 for repairs, I assume it is a pretty house in a solid neighborhood, so a very easy starter deal.

$1,600 per month rent on a $180K purchase should roughly yield the cashflow you have here.  Since you have specific numbers for taxes, P&I and others, I'm presuming you've done your homework on those numbers.

Two things that caught my eye. Your roof is from 2003 which means you may need a new one in 3-8 years. Have you had anyone confirm its condition? Also, not sure where you got that interest rate, but that is very high for these days. If you are looking to buy in an LLC, I'd consider buying in your own name, getting the lower interest rate and adding in more liability coverage (property+umbrella). The deal will perform better that way.

@Greg Scott Thank you for the very helpful response. The Roof did have an inspection and they gave it 10 more years. I was actually working on financing through my LLC which my bank will not do so they are recommending a trust Instead? Do you feel that with my first property I would be okay doing it as an individual with an umbrella? It is such a talked about topic and Im so unsure for liability reasons.

Brittany:

I'm not a lawyer so I'm just giving you my personal opinions they may or may not be relevant to your specific situation.

First of all a trust is not an asset protection tool; it is an estate planning tool.   So, I'd ignore your bank unless you are also doing estate planning right now.

People love talking about LLCs. In reality the first line of defense is running your properties right. If you allow people to dump toxic chemicals on your property you deserve to get sued. If you maintain a clean and functional property and address safety issues as needed, your odds of getting in trouble become much smaller. Surround yourself with some great insurance and you've solved 99%+ of the problem.  I know dozens of people that own hundreds of single family properties collectively and can't recall one ever being sued.

Think about your asset protection from a lawyers perspective. The lawyer gets a call from someone about a slip and fall and decides he can make a few bucks. What do they do? What they are really hoping is they spend a couple hours writing a letter to your insurance company and they get a check for $5K. That is a pretty good ROI for 2 hours.

But, what if it was a bigger deal like someone lost an arm? For the lawyer, the low hanging fruit is still getting the insurance company to pay out. They'll shoot for the maximum liability coverage you have. Still a great ROI for them. Do you think they want to drag you to court and try to get a judge to order a judgement and then chase after you trying to collect? Not a good ROI for them.

One of the saddest things I've seen is people going LLC-crazy.  They have a master LLC with child LLCs for each property and build this huge legal construct for 3 or 4 single family properties.  It's insane.  Each year they will have to pay fees to maintain each LLC, and CPA fees to file taxes for each LLC.  Even worse, many people don't maintain their LLCs properly.  If an LLC is not maintained properly, a good lawyer could get the entity disregarded in a lawsuit.  So, the real fool has a ton of LLCs they aren't maintaining and minimum insurance.  The Emperor has no clothes in that case.

Personally, I slept well at night with a $500K liability policy on each property and a $2M liability umbrella.

I can't tell you what is the right thing for you to do.  If you are famous or have some serious wealth, it's probably good to have some entity protection, if nothing else for the privacy.  You are a target. For many people, especially those first starting out, it seems like fearmongering drives most of the entity creation.

Thank you so much for your help. I have an appointment to talk to my attorney on Wednesday to see what he thinks would be best. I also looked into my interest rate and as you said it was high. I am now getting a 3.65% which does make my numbers better. I greatly appreciate your time and help. I am going to make this year great starting from the start! We close march 5th!