All Forum Posts by: Ceril S.

@Taylor Comer I second the advice about Google voice - free and super useful - you can forward it to your cell, have it be just on answering machine, customize greetings, etc. when the number gets called both my phone and my wife's phone ring and when a message is left I get a text and an email transcript. Super cool and handy. 

We are newbies too and we went ahead and set up a PO box for mailing payments and to use as our address for everything. No home address or home phone number on anything! Once we forgot and called someone back from our home phone - never again!!!

Are you inheriting tenants or do you have to find new ones?  

@Justin C. I would definitely check out along the train and bus lines. Within 60 min to NYC gets you pretty deep in NJ. http://njtransit.com

Here's a map:

http://www.njtransit.com/pdf/rail/Rail_System_Map....

Some towns are definitely more doable than others, but this should give you an idea at least where to look. 

I agree with @Colleen F. -part of the reason we made the in-law addition in the first place was because so many places that had an extra apartment claiming mother/daughter had the smaller apartment either upstairs or with steps to the bathroom  (in the case of a basement). Since we had built it out ourselves we had the luxury of making it handicap accessible all on one level. 

As others have said this would depend on your area.  One of the houses that I sold in the past we had added an in-law apartment that was beautiful.  We had to notiify our neighbors and go to a hearing with the town to have an exception made to zoning.  It was only approved because it was for my aging in-laws and because it was not obvious from the street that there was an extra apartment.  When we sold that house there was a bidding war with the winning bid coming in at $25k over our asking price.  (Granted this was in 2008)

As a business model - I'm not sure how it would work because of zoning.  However, during our hearing with town, we had to present a case that the apartment was"removable' and able to be used as part of the single family home.  We told them that the kitchen would become part of a "great room" as a wet bar.  I suppose you could call it something else in the plans "2nd master suite"? or family great room with wet bar? The small stove is about the same size as a wine fridge.

we have a sentence within our no pet clause about no feeding of stray animals - we have tons of feral cats that live in the neighborhood and I think the previous owner used to feed them  

the nolo books also usually have a code for free downloadable forms - we just got the codes off the books in the library. 

We also signed up for a free month of rocketlawyer to download a copy of our state specific lease to work on as the base of our lease as well as other forms. 

We got copies of "truth in renting" and lead paint disclosure booklets from our realtor. 

We also made a move in quick tip sheet with phone #s for utilities, info on garbage/recycling, etc.  

I would think you'd be able to use some disbursements from your 529s towards housing - not sure how much and if the house is owned or managed by your property management company I would imagine they would still sign a lease and pay rent like everyone else.  Let us know what you find out!  I was wondering if they had a 10k/yr room and board budget could you use 40k to buy the place?  Not sure that you could....but I'm curious. 

@Elizabeth ColegroveThanks for this list! I saw that you had posted this before and adding a fine for smoking or pets was one of those "aha!" moments for us because we were just discussing how to enforce the no smoking/no pets in our lease.  Although - I think we may add an "initial here" box to those clauses to be sure that it's understood completely. Our lease ended up being about 12 pages long.  

@Gregory MassiCongrats on the new place! we closed on our first last friday so we are constantly reviewing this process.  Handed over keys to our first tenant this morning!  We also have a few addendum pages - A page of emergency numbers and non-emergency numbers for local police, fire, utilities.  When to contact us for emergency (WATER!) and how to contact us for non-emergency maintainence.  We also include a sheet with the list of utilities phone numbers, where to get tenant insurance, etc.

@Latasha Phillips Welcome to BP!  As I'm sure you already know - there is so much info here!  Yes, the search box is your friend and I've gotten more info than I ever knew I wanted to know reading up on all the forums. Also, posting a well thought out question gets responses from seriously experienced people - this in itself is absolutely priceless! I've asked people "in real estate" ie. My realtor questions and I've gotten blank stares in return - when I ask here, it's from an investor mindset and it's far more "real world" and useful if that makes sense. 

Anyhow - my ex was from clifton so I know your area somewhat. If I lived closer I would think that it's a great area to work. Some great solid old properties there and some great neighborhoods with mixed use areas if you know the area well.  My ex-in-laws were off valley rd. In clifton.

Anyhow, Welcome!  Make sure you post how things are going! (And I'm sure we will want some of your accounting knowledge and experience here as well!)

@Jake Recz I saw this link in another thread.  http://www.zilpy.com/ it shows a bunch of info but mostly it was interesting to see that it shows manville as having 41% renters with 7% vacancies. Sounds like a good demand to me but I'm open to hearing how others interpret the data. The house we bought is in perfect condition and was owner occupied, the neighborhood looks to be maybe 60% or more of rentals - but the flood zone issue seems to be taking its toll. We are a bit nervous about the rising cost of flood ins. But our numbers still worked even with the flood ins. Factored in.