All Forum Posts by: Jason Chambers

@Jeff Graves we took out a HELOC on our home in Hawaii and paid that same home off with it. We got our HELOC through Bank of Hawaii. Their customer service and closing time is a little slow but with an introductory rate of 1.75% at 85% LTV you can't beat it. We initially got a PLOC through Hawaii State Federal Credit union to pay down some principal to have enough equity to be able to get the HELOC. Once we pulled the trigger on the HELOC we actually ended up paying off the home, the PLOC, and our car. We use our HELOC like a checking account and deposit all our income into it and since we pay next to nothing in interest we're seriously impacting our principal. And remember, since it's a line of credit, as you pay it down that money becomes available again to invest in other properties. Back to your original question, our home in Hawaii used to be our primary residence but we moved to Texas a couple years ago. We closed our HELOC about 6 months ago and the banks in Hawaii are ok with opening HELOC's on investment properties.

Aloha!

We got ours fixed with a low introductory rate. We've found that many smaller banks and no credit unions are allowed to offer this type of financing in the state of Texas. The larger banks like Bank of America and Wells Fargo can and offer various fixed and adjustable rate HELOC's with LTV's (Loan to Value) of 80-90%. Shop around. I've heard of introductory rates as low as 2.4% with BofA. In the case of both PLOC's and HELOC's, even if you got a higher interest rate (remember we're talking simple interest) it blows even the lowest mortgage rates (compound interest) out of the water. In our case it was the difference between a $3200 a month mortgage for own home in Hawaii and the $700 a month payment we owed after paying off the mortgage with our HELOC. We charge our tenants significantly more than what our mortgage used to be. We're killing the principal balance!

I finally started a BP profile and I'm happy to be here. My wife and I are both active duty military stationed in El Paso, TX. We've been investing for a few years now and own a property in Hawaii and 3 in Texas. We just recently closed on two multi-family properties and have been networking locally as much as we can to keep growing our portfolio. We've been focused on buy and hold but we are now leaning toward flips. We totally renovated our current home but it was a disaster of a process. We went way over budget, way over schedule and fired some contractors along the way. We don't ever want to go through that again so that's why we're here, to make connections and learn.