All Forum Posts by: Enoch Wolsey

Any chance we can get an update for an Android version?

Thank you all! Your posts have definitely given me food for thought. I appreciate you taking the time to reply.

Hello everyone,

Forgive me if this isn't the correct forum. 

Me and my wife purchased a duplex that we have been house hacking for the last year and a half. I'm trying to figure out when we should buy our primary home. I keep thinking of Robert Kiyosaki saying that your primary home is a liability, which I understand. I'm just not sure how to save up the total amount for a house in my market. 

I'm trying to come up with a plan for whether I should be saving a larger down payment for a nicer house where I can have it paid off relatively quickly. 

Another consideration is to pay off my duplex, and use proceeds from the sale to purchase a primary house so more can be saved without worrying about a large mortgage for where I'm living (liability that stops you from saving for investments).

Something else I've considered is to stay here for as long as possible and save a down payment for another property that I can rent out (just worried that this will mean that we'll never have a primary house).

Where I live, the prices for homes are kind of higher so it seems like it would take forever to get any momentum any method I choose.

Could someone explain a way to (possibly) get the best of both worlds? Or explain what you did and how long it took you to get there?

Hey guys,

I currently have an Android and I'm looking for an app that has all the stuff you'd want to have to be able to evaluate a potential property. Do you guys have any apps that you'd suggest?

@Jody Sperling I definitely don't want to wait it out, but I still need to obtain some money for a down payment and we are out of the state that we want to invest in right now (we are living in Idaho while my wife finishes school and then we are moving down to Utah). Thank you for the Facebook group idea! I would love to join it and go when I'm down in the area! So, if your recommendation is to NOT wait, what would you recommend I do?

@Joseph Vu I am currently renting with my wife at $890/month. I have looked at possibly getting down payment assistance but I'm unsure which one I would qualify for. I was looking at the Home Possible as well as HomeReady loans and they look like they might be good options. I do have a Cash-Value life insurance policy that I have some funds that I could use, but it's only about $6,000 (I just started it about a year and half ago). I also have been overpaying our car payment by $700/month to pay it down faster. My grandpa (who has done real estate with duplexes for a long time) told me that it would be a better idea to save the $700 and just pay the minimum amount ($400) so that's what I've started to do. 

I do make a relatively good amount of income with my wife (I make $28/hour working 40 hours per week and my wife makes $10.80/hour working about 20 hours per week). So I think we would be able to come up with the money relatively quickly. Unfortunately, because I'm also doing school (mine is completely online), I don't have enough time to get a second job but I have thought about it once I finish. 

I would love to hear how you bought that many houses and how you made money off of those deals!

Because my wife didn't go for the living with roommates option (I asked), it would have to be a duplex, triplex, or quad.

I did that as well but then I was thinking about it and realized that there are all of these properties with amenities that small multi-family properties will probably not have and think that they might need to rent for less, what are your thoughts? I mean, I might pay a little more to live in "My own place" but I don't know if that's a general consensus or not.

@Erik W. I am currently working as a Billing Manager at a utility billing company. I make relatively good money (see above). I currently only have about $7,000 saved up which is why I'm thinking I might need to wait before I get started with Real Estate. 

I was talking to my dad and he said that he also would like to get into real estate but I am not sure what a good deal would be considering that I want to live in the property and he just wants the cash flow. So, if I could figure out a deal I could possibly get some of the downpayment from him.

And I apologize for not being more specific with my original post, I would also like to do Real Estate as a side hustle as well until I'm "making a killing" with real estate.

I'm different because I'm more persistent than the average Jo, I have already done financial advising as a side hustle that brought me into the world of finance (and one of the reasons why I'm interested in real estate). 

And I totally agree with you, I already jumped ship from a previous job that I had to do financial advising and I really should have stuck with my job so that I had a steady income at that point.

I definitely didn't think about health insurance, (which is a big deal for me since I am a type 1 diabetic and asthmatic), so that is even more reason for me to stick with a more stable job for now while I'm building.

When you say 3-12 months making money, are you talking more specifically as a real estate agent? I don't think that's what I want to get into, I mostly want to get the benefits of having rental properties that I can receive rental income off of.

Once I get enough of a downpayment, I think I should be able to get a loan, my back-end DTI isn't terrible as the only thing that I'm paying for is the car payment of $400/month and we are making about 5250/month gross. My credit score is also relatively good at 766 for Experian and 755 for both TransUnion and Equifax.

@Jaron Walling Yeah! Pretty much everything in my life is stable, the only issue I have is not being able to get an FHA loan due to not living in the property since we won't be moving down to Utah for about a year. My wife and I are thinking about possibly living with her parents and saving a lot of money (hopefully about $2500/month) until we find a deal, (granted, we haven't talked to them about it since it's still a year out).

@Stephen Brown I think that's a great idea! The only problem I'm running into is making sure that my wife can get to the school that she is going to be doing student teaching at.

@Jeffrey Donis I've just been looking on a few of the different websites that I have found online that real estate agents have set up notifications on. Do you have any BP forums or Facebook groups that you suggest?

THANK YOU SO MUCH EVERYONE FOR ALL YOUR INPUT!

I would love any more thoughts and opinions on what I should do. 

Also, I have looked into getting quadplexes but most of them seem like they might be out of my price range at $650,000-$850,000. Granted, I'm not completely sure because I don't know what most of them are renting at. Do you think that getting a quad could be in my price range and still cashflow?

Hello all!

I just realized that this is what I want to do for my career but my wife is going to school and we will be moving back to live with family within a year.

I really would like to house hack as it seems like the safest way to get started and to save a lot of money for the future but I'm not sure what to do RIGHT NOW because we won't be able to purchase and live at the property for at least a year.

We are currently looking to purchase in Davis County or Weber County, UT as that is where my wife will be doing student teaching but the prices are crazy and, after doing numbers for a few dozen properties, I just can't seem to get the numbers to work.

So, in essence, should I just wait it out? Also, as a side question, it seems like very few properties list what the tenants are paying for rent, when that's the case, do you just estimate what you think the numbers could be for the sqft and average rent?