All Forum Posts by: Stephen Masek

There are smaller cities here you can get a house for $25,000. You can check rents using Craigslist and so forth.

You need to have reserves for vacancies and repairs.

One thing I wish I had done when I was young was work two jobs to build up more money. Can you do that?

If you are broke, you are living very dangerously and need to sell the place, or get a second job to get your income up and build reserves.

$1-2K is a very expensive repair and $5K is way too high to replace it. We just bought a condenser unit (the exterior part of the system) for a house in southern California, and it was $1,850 installed.

It appears you do not know how to work on any of this. I replaced a bad contactor in one of the condenser units in my house, and bad inducer fans in both furnaces. Some wholesale parts places will not sell, as they are not set-up to collect sales taxes, but all of the parts are available on the Internet.

I'll join in expressing a desire for local meetings. They can be formal meetings in meeting rooms, or fun things such as meeting at a certain spot on the beach in Laguna Beach.

When I click on "my discussions," then on a thread in it, It takes me back to the main forum, not back to my discussions."

Besides paying cash, we will often make a large earnest money deposit - $5,000 to $7,000. It helps. In the crazy places with 30 - 40 offers, nothing helps.

A home inspector will not be able to tell you about asbestos. Florida has a crazy license/certification for asbestos consultants, but they are still plentiful, so you need to find one. 1970s is too new to have LBP, but it must be assumed to be present, so testing for it is money well-spent. They can probably do both for $1,000. If you test before closing, during your due diligence period, you can use the results to negotiate the price.

J Scott raised the issue of doing something you enjoy. That is surely part of being rich/wealthy - freedom to do what you enjoy.

I suspect I'd really enjoy doing flips, so am thinking about how that might be possible with staying in the southern California climate and fitting it in with my current business.

When was it built? Asbestos & lead may also be issues to deal with, adding to repair costs.

Perhaps you do not want to state numbers, so what percentage return on what you have invested do you plan to have made at year 5?

Thanks for a wonderful posting! I've slowly come to realize that we need to study such smaller cities, but have to determine how to do so while living in southern California.

Do any of you remember the mention of savvy investors going to Atlanta in The Millionaire Next Door? If you haven't read it, it is an excellent book.

Wow! How much of the rehab did you do? Did you get it off the MLS?

I need to get some of those in such cities, but need to determine how to be able to do it. We live in southern California, 10 miles straight line from the Pacific Ocean, and my business is based here. Worse part, I know how buildings are built, and how to do wiring and plumbing (I wrote parts of a standard for inspecting commercial buildings), so no contractor can try to feed me baloney.