All Forum Posts by: Herman Fox

 Thank you for your reply!  Option 2 does seem appealing in a lot of ways, and as you say lots of variants.  It also doesn't escape me that only have one house during this downturn might be missed opportunity cost and maybe option 1 might be better in that sense of "buying the dip"

I'm a late newbie RE investor and only own a primary residence with a family of two kids.  We have about 600k equity in our Bay Area,CA  house with another 650K left to pay on our 2.5% refinanced mortgage.  I also have enough cash on hand for 20% down for a potential property and have been waiting for housing prices to go down in AZ.  I was thinking of renting out our CA house once we found an AZ home but have noticed long rental vacancies in my CA neighborhood.  With my 2.5% rate, I could still probably rent for under market rate including cap expenditure to keep the property at break even and allow me to keep the home for potential price or rental appreciation while i pull a new conventional loan in AZ.  I suppose this decision puts me in the long term mortgage game, but allows me to "use other people's money" -RDPD 

OR

I let go of this fantastic mortgage rate, and use the equity of our house by selling the CA house to purchase the AZ house with all cash.  No mortgage ever.  This would allow us to rapidly invest more from our W2 income for either retirement or hopefully a second chance at having that second rental property to hopefully attain FIRE retirement as the ultimate goal.

What would the Biggerpocket community suggest given my circumstance and runway? I've also been digging around trying to find househacking opportunities in big duplex/multifamilies but those only exist in TX as far as i've noticed, and i'm not savvy enough (yet) to be a wholesale/flipper.  I wouldn't mind learning but I also don't have much runway being 44 yrs young. 

Thanks for any suggestion, excited to be here!

@Jay Norlund @here, It's been a few years since your original post, but I'm wondering if you or anyone concluded with ADU success in Pheonix and if you could impart any knowledge on your findings. Is Phoenix following CA trend to allow ADUs to lighten the load of affordable housing? Did you avoid working in the "greyzone" or are you taking the risk?

Will keep researching but my first few googles led me to BiggerPockets and I remembered I was a member  😅.    I'm new and personally looking to start my journey.  Thanks to any reply!

@Kelly Claiborne I want to invest out of state but dont know about wage growth cities with low crime ar areas within thise cities. I live in bay area, and its just too expensive to do anything local.

I also think the market has a lot of downturn coming with the 2nd corona wave...so maybe its hard to find renters who can stay employed = fear for investing.

@James Wachob. thanks for sharing this list! very helpful for first timers like myself