All Forum Posts by: Chad Clanton

Any other takers?

Hi Doug, thanks for your feedback; Bob disappeared on about 6 different rehabbers at the same time right around then, with over $100K in paid for, incomplete work. For a couple of weeks prior to that, we each kept having "break-ins" wherein we'd lose appliances, HVAC equipment, higher dollar items like that, then they'd show up at one of the other rehabber's projects as the "new (appliance, HVAC component, etc)". This round-robin loss/acquisition cycle went on for a couple of weeks, and then he disappeared shortly after it all fell apart on him i.e. we all pretty much found out about each other and what was going on with our respective projects and confronted him about it. Boom, next morning, gone. Good times; for anyone who is thinking about rehabbing out of their area but is nervous about things like this, please refer to my blog post on where and how we went wrong with our project, and how we intend to mitigate our risks going forward:

Now for a Whole Bunch of Lessons from Our First Rehab Experience...

Sounds good, and of course for the many who may not want to share their Skype ID's in the open, it's always possible to go down this thread and shoot messages with the ID in it.

@John Hixon  I know what you mean, my boys are almost two and four; funny, I thought they were supposed to take care of themselves or something :-P Scheduling meetups would be cool too, but I'm even talking about if you happen to see one of the group come online, just seeing if they want to talk, no prior arrangement involved. Done both ways, it seems to me that it would give folks with the really busy schedules a chance to just chime in real time and discuss things whenever they did have time. Kind of the virtual version of water cooler talk, I suppose. Curious to see how many folks would be interested overall.

@Brian Woods  Lol I'm not an IT guy :-P, but I do find it very useful; something in particular most people I know don't seem to be aware of is that you can screen share; to me, that alone makes paying a little bit monthly worthwhile; so much easier to discuss details, especially involving analysis, etc, when you can actually see it in front of you. Personally, I think it would be awesome to have a bunch of BP folks on a contact list, and if they sign on when you're not busy, just see if they want to talk shop. I'm interested to see what others have to say.

Hmmm, think I got caught in the site update ;-) That explains it! Lol anyway, back on topic...

EDIT: Well that's strange, the main message isn't showing on my end; well, here it is anyway!

Good evening all! So I'm sitting here at about 3:51 AM and wondering, does anyone else have really crazy hours? I tend to be up at all hours, and I'm curious if anyone else thinks it would be interesting to, once you had members' Skype names, link up on Skype and talk REI. Personally, I pay the $9.99 or so a month for the added features because I use it so often, but by and large Skype doesn't cost anything. So, if you had Skype, not much to do for a little bit (whatever the time), and saw that other BP folks whose contact info you had previously obtained were online, would you be interested in spontaneous virtual REI meetups? I'd be curious to hear how many folks would be interested, or what everyone thinks. Chime in!

Good evening all! So I'm sitting here at about 3:51 AM and wondering, does anyone else have really crazy hours? I tend to be up at all hours, and I'm curious if anyone else thinks it would be interesting to, once you had members' Skype names, link up on Skype and talk REI. Personally, I pay the $9.99 or so a month for the added features because I use it so often, but by and large Skype doesn't cost anything. So, if you had Skype, not much to do for a little bit (whatever the time), and saw that other BP folks whose contact info you had previously obtained were online, would you be interested in spontaneous virtual REI meetups? I'd be curious to hear how many folks would be interested, or what everyone thinks. Chime in!

@Jason Smith , I've traditionally been an all-Windows guy since it was what I knew, but I transitioned primarily to a Macbook Pro a couple of years ago and have loved it. It's gotten close enough, controls-wise (mouse clicks, scroll, basic things like that) to what I'm used to that it was easy enough to adapt. I've fallen in love with the Mac for multitasking and quick-use Apps, and it hasn't crashed on me once; if it were my old Dell, I'd be on my 5th reformat. That said, get the extended warranty, just because. I did have a new logic board put in (time-frame specific defect, I'm told) which would have run between $600-800, but the extended warranty got me clear. Oh, and they shipped it off for repair and I received it back two days later; forgot that part.

One last item in regards to the whole incompatible Windows program bit; there is an operating system out there called Parallels which you can install on a Mac, and then install Windows itself, so you can actually run both systems simultaneously, and you don't have to buy Mac-specific software if there are certain programs you want. Figuring out the directories cross-system takes some getting used to, but is generally pretty straightforward. As I mentioned, I've been running it for a couple of years with nary a software problem; hope this helps,and good luck with your purchase!

Dusty, we're finishing up our first rehab, and I remember being pretty surprised at just how expensive the closing costs were at purchase. I'd be glad to share my HUD statement for the property so you can see exactly how we did at purchase; shoot me a PM or email and we can link up