All Forum Posts by: Brian Mathews

Do you have any experience in construction?   Or in real estate?   If not, I wouldn't mess with flipping until you have some experience.   You will get eaten alive by subs and others in the business as they will sense your inexperience.   I've seen it a lot of times before.   Before you know it, your money is gone and you have some crappy, half finished house you will have to unload to somebody.    Get educated, don't rush into anything until you thoroughly understand it.   Its your money.   Same with buying rentals, be careful and take your time.   Remember the tortoise always wins the race.  

Pay it off.   Why give the bank a dollar to save giving the gov't a quarter. If you paid off $100K in less than a year.   You'll have this place paid off in 2 years.  

How much was the house?   I had a customer that built a house on credit cards and then his plan was to refinance once it was done.   Then the great recession started.   He had a hell of a time trying to refinance it, he eventually found a lender that was willing to do it.  

Why would you want to invest in real estate to lose money or break even.   You're spending a dollar to avoid giving Uncle Sam 33 cents?   I'd rather have the dollar and give Uncle Sam 33 cents of it personally.   Go and talk to an investment person to help you out and setup a plan.   You just have to get your AGI down to reduce your tax burden.   You can do that by increasing your contributions to your investments or donating to charities.    How long have you been a high level earner and do you expect to sustain it or was it a 1 or 2 year deal?  

Lots of competition and not many deals around.   Austin's secret is out.  You have to search for them.   

It depends on what you want to do.    First thing is to have money and ready to go.   You're in Austin like me.   Things move fast, you must be ready to buy when you can, otherwise you'll lose the house.  Then who you need will depend on what you want to do.    

If you're using "contractors" that don't invoice.   You aren't using contractors.   You're using chuck in a truck or the guy working for beer and cigarette money.   Likely they don't have insurance either.   They're contract labor.   Get them to fill out a W9 and sign a waiver of no workmens comp.  

@Brandon G.

I'm just not much of a conspiracy guy.   The very definition of conspiracy being more than one person damned near makes it impossible.   It's hard to find 2 people who can keep their mouths shut.   I think race is thrown out there entirely too often as a way to sensationalize a story and get the headlines.   I agree with Jay about how banks had to make loans available to certain areas to do business there and those areas had high concentrations of minorities.   Were there some unscrupulous guys out there taking advantage of people?  Hell yeah.   

I'd watch out.   When he gets audited by the IRS and he will pulling stunts like this.   You'll likely have to answer to them, which just puts you on their radar.   He is either a very unsophisticated business owner or a sleaze ball.   

I don't think there was a concerted effort to offer loans to any certain racial segment of our population.   More to a certain financial segment.   Unfortunately, there is a larger percentage of the population of color that fall into this lower financial segment.   Sadly people of all colors in this segment do not have the education or understanding to see that they were getting screwed, they were sold on the American dream of home ownership and played into their emotions to buy a home even though they could not afford it and didn't do simple math.   When you have a house payment of $1500 a month and your income is $2000 a month, it's not going to take long until you can no longer afford it.  Or one of my favorites, the 2-1-1 buydown loan.   Unfortunately, the income didn't rise as fast as the property taxes did and they were soon sunk within 2-3 years