How do you actually decide how much to set aside for maintenance each month?

[Giuseppe Cavucci]

I've been thinking about this a lot lately. Most advice I see is generic ("save 1-2% of property value per year") but that never accounted for the actual age of my systems.

A roof that's 3 years old and a roof that's 22 years old shouldn't have the same reserve treatment, but most of the rules of thumb I've found treat them the same.

Curious how others here actually calculate this. Do you use a flat percentage? Track individual system age? Just wing it and hope for the best?

[Drew Sygit]

You are correct, but there are several challenges:

1) How to know the age of everything when you buy an older property?

2) The costs of items really have nothing to do with the value of the property or the amount of rent collected.

3) Costs don't necessarily increase at a set annual rate. Post COVID, labor costs for contractors dramatically increased! How do you accurately plan for costs 5+ years in the future?

4) The local environment and preventive maintenance also affect the lifetime of many things.

5) Even tree coverage can affect the life of a roof, ac unit, etc.!

Maybe AI will eventually be used to create an all-encompassing solution.

At the moment though, all we can do is "guesstimate".