All Forum Posts by: Mike Kruser

Mike K, if you have another life and rentals, you really need a handyman on call, someone who can get over there and take care of small emergencies. If you have to take off from a paying job every time you get a call, you probably won't have that job very long.

What could happen to the property? And btw - it takes longer to drive from the north side of Chicago to the south side of Chicago than it does to drive from Chicago to Laporte, Indiana. What's important, the distance or the time it takes to get there?

Originally posted by Mike Kruser:

All the Financial Information and Expense Information i dont understand at all.

Mike, I will say this..IMHO, if you don't clearly understand the "Financial Information and Expense Information", I am not sure how ready you are to pull the trigger.

For a good RE investment to come together, you need so many factors. Some of those factors are:

1) Drive to succeed
2) Understanding of your area
3) Understanding of the financial aspect
4) Capital/Means to finance
5) Luck

The above are only some of the things you MUST have in order to succeed. You clearly have the drive to succeed and sounds like you have the means to finance also, but you have to be very honest with yourself about your understanding of the area and the financial aspect.

You must have ALL of the things come together before you can succeed, not combination of some of them.

I don't know much about your situation, but from your profile, it looks like you are only 19, which is a very young age. You have time on your hand, use it to the best of your ability. It will help you a great deal may be to join couple of REIA in and around Chicago if you haven't already done so. I can tell you about couple of good ones. You will be surprised how much you will learn from just talking to other people about their experiences.

You may feel like you need to make some quick decisions to make REI happen for you, but you gotta be patient. You want to try to minimize your "cost" of education as much as possible. You don't need to make mistakes to learn from them. You will find so many other people who have already made mistakes, which you can learn from. The best education is the one, which you can earn on other people's dime.

Please excuse my rambling, it's 3 am. Time to hit the bed.

Here's the lowdown with low income housing. It's a starting point for investors who want cashflow.

It takes very little money to acquire and get low income housing cashflowing. The flip side is you won't have much equity in 1 house and your exit strategies will be limited. You're basically looking at renting it or selling it to another landlord who will not pay full retail. It is more work to keep them working but really not that much more. I have a house I bought for 12k that a tenant is moving out of this month on the 3rd after 1 year of living there. The new tenant is moving in on the 13th. Is there more work with getting new tenants more often? Sure, but this 12k house gets me $550-575 a month. Stick that in your spreadsheet and smoke it. It doesn't take a lot of judiciously purchased 10-12k houses to eliminate the need for a full time job. I haven't had one for 3 years now.

That's pretty much what low income landlording is. That's why some people do it. Most people can figure out a way to put 100k together and can use it to get started.

Originally posted by Mike Kruser:

it just doesn't make sense to me, a slumlord buys a property for 100k has to chase people around to get rent money always evicting someone, just to maybe clear about 3k a year on that 1 property. I mean i make more than 3k a year with just the dividends on my stocks. Seems a Slumlord is a Lose, Lose situation. What am I missing here?

Honestly you're just making up numbers (or you're too used to Chicago), that's what you're missing. I deal in low income but make it clean and safe and my whole portfolio cost about 100k and it grosses about 60k a year at full occupancy.