All Forum Posts by: Alvin Sylvain

I don't believe there is anything you can do that would be worth the effort. To me, it is no where near "eye-wateringly ugly". Not my first choice for looks to be sure, but not all that bad.

I guess the important question is, is this your personal home, a rental or a flip? If it's a rental, remember you don't have to live there, and somebody else might love it. If it's a flip, tear out the whole thing as part of your rehab expenses. If it's your personal home, why are you asking on BP?

 Kiyosaki is a great author for the general gist and philosophy of things, but don't look to him for any concrete advice that has any real accuracy. I've heard some of the things he says are flat-out wrong. I have read "Rich Dad" and the philosophy is great.

But when I said "Pay Yourself First", I was actually thinking about a book I've heard some great things about, but have as yet to actually read -- "The Richest Man in Babylon". As I recall, the advice, among other things, is to squirrel away 10% of your income this way. From what I've heard, the book is a must-read.

You might also be interested in "The Millionaire Next Door", the point of which is, your neighbor could be a millionaire but you'd never know it coz he's not wasting his money on fancy cars and expensive jewelry.

But I don't care, I still want a Porsche 911 Convertible. Blue if you please, with a grey interior. :-)

 First thing you do is clean up that credit. There is only two ways to get bad credit: late pays and no pays. Why should anybody want to risk lending you money with that kind of track record?

I suggest finding a bank that offers automatic payments, which shouldn't be hard to do. Many of them will not only automatically send payments, on time every time, but they can be set up to contact your creditors to find out exactly how much is owed. Let me tell you, once I had set up just about every creditor in the computer, I don't even think about it anymore, and my score is in the upper 700's now (800 here I come!)

Also watch your spending -- it's no good attempting to pay people on time if your bank account famously sports a Zero Balance. Over-spending is probably the biggest problem in 90% of the households world-wide, excepting those primitive tribes that haven't discovered money yet. Part of that banking computer thing, create a special account and automatically put aside a certain amount into that account each and every month. "Pay Yourself First" as the motto goes.

The next thing you do is decide what kind of investments do you want to pursue. There's a lot of materials here on BP to read, to discuss, to learn about. While you're waiting for your credit score to slowly climb to acceptable levels, learn everything you can in a broad sense, then figure out where you want to concentrate, then concentrate on that area with LASER FOCUS.

Bottom line, nobody can tell you what to do with some arbitrary sum of money. You need to self-educate to the point where you no longer need that kind of advice. But at least you've come to the right place for that!

Here's my take-away ...

Can you make enough of a profit if you bought at full price? Work your numbers and be absolutely certain of them.

I mean, this is not a game of Monopoly where the guy with the most houses and hotels on the board is the winner. This is business. If you can't make your target numbers at full price, and you can't get less than full price, then you only have one option.

And I don't think I need to tell you what that option is.

 I don't recall which "R" it is, but one of those "R"'s is "Repair" (or maybe "Rehab")

This means you get your equity from buying a property on the cheap, then fixing it up to improve the value. Then you invoke another "R" for "Refinance", but now refinancing at the higher value.

If you do it right, the rents will cover the payments on this new loan, which essentially translates into "free money".

Then you get the next "R", "Repeat". After some period of time, you go out and find another property in need of repairs than you can buy on the cheap.

In terms of whether the money gained from loans on property A will pay for the repairs on property B depend on the exact numbers involved. Things like how much you borrowed to acquire property A, such as 30% down on the depressed value, or if the depressed value is low enough to pay all cash.

Remember, the key is (depressed value + rehab cost) is hopefully a lot less than (improved value). Your first loan, if you're not buying cash, is against the (depressed value + rehab cost). Your next loan is against the higher improved value, which you use to pay off the first loan and invest in the next project.

I think BP has a BRRRR calculator online. It will probably help you visualize the parts of the process if you ran a few made-up scenarios through the calculator.

Have you run the numbers on the properties you've seen?

I don't want to hear, "it appears that they should cash flow ok". That's wishy-washy.

I want to hear, "I ran the numbers through the BP Calculator and narrowed down to the ones that merit further investigation. I'm going to call those agents to get more information, and run that additional data through the Calculator."

YES! YES! YES!

I am sick nearly to death of everybody on the planet wanting to buy my house, as is, all cash, for probably 50 cents on the dollar.

It's crazy! I got an offer in my PO box offering to buy my PO box!

I was seriously considering contacting the person to ask what they were going to offer me, and what exactly they planned to do about the real owner, the U.S. Government.

eh, what I've said has been said before, and they won't let me delete this post ...

All's I can say is, if I had that kind of money, I'd have left already.

Would that part about continuing to tax you 10 years after you leave hold up in court? I'm no lawyer, but there's gotta be something unconstitutional about it somewhere.

Have you had opportunity to run the numbers on a potential duplex purchase on BP's rental calculator yet?
If not -- do it. Now.
Search the Internet for duplexes for sale in areas where you're interested in investing. Consider getting a duplex or a tri- or a quad- and moving in to one unit ("House Hacking"). Enter the particulars from each place you see into the BP calculator -- as a "Pro" member, you can do this as often as you want, so do it every day.
When you find an acceptable place where you can make the numbers work (and you may need to change things just a little; such as the asking price) -- make an offer.