All Forum Posts by: JD Martin

My first question would be "What qualifies you to teach a master class on lawyer-less evictions?" You'd have to have a good answer before I would be interested in paying, or even attending a free class. 

Do not mess with it unless it's coming apart. You risk far more health danger by having it torn up than by just leaving it alone and covering it with something that doesn't require grinding, drilling or punching holes into it - like a floating vinyl plank floor, or glue-down CVTs, etc. Remember that your "certified asbestos removal contractor" is only as good as his/her employees and they can just as easily screw things up too. 

I would only remove asbestos if it was already coming apart and could not be sealed up. And anything that's not an active hazard, I cannot imagine you have to tell your tenants. 

 I would second this. My agent was a neophyte when it came to investment properties when I first started working with him many years ago. So was I. We learned together - I bought properties and had successes and some road blocks, and he studied what I did, and learned what I was and was not looking for, and over time it ended up a very good symbiotic relationship. But I had to put in the time studying things, learning what made something a good rental and what did not.

The only real question is what you want/need to do with the money. Beyond that the differences really don't matter all that much. Everyone invests in order to make money. If you never access that money, then you essentially do like the 40 year janitor that lives in a hovel and dies with 3 million in the bank. Everyone else has already answered the question from a financial point of view - it's a good way to access tax-deferred funds, with the caveat that you will realize a lower rate of return if you don't make 5% annual return [caveat: the additional interest deduction may lower what you need by 25/50bp] (you don't need to cover the delta on a refinance, only your landing rate). But you may have other intentions for that money other than solely reinvesting it.

Don't get locked into a prism that you should never cash anything in unless you're going to reinvest it. Money is for living your life, and sometimes that means spending some of it. Us investors can put blinders on and never spend a dime until it's too late to spend anything. 

If I didn't need the money for something specific, and at this point in my life where I'm closer to winding down than buying more, I'd probably just let it ride because I don't want to work that hard identifying other investments and increasing my costs. But if I were 20 years younger, I'd probably cash it out and add to my investments. 

 I don't know how it looks, but it's dangerous in my area with narrow mountain roads and no shoulders. Beyond that, not having a vehicle means you can't even do any minor work on a property if you happen to be there. My truck is a rolling toolbox, with a camper top on the back, and I can often take care of minor issues right on the spot when I make rounds. For that reason I wouldn't do it. 

Beyond that, going around on a bike is going to be differentiating yourself from your tenant, opposite of what you're trying to do. Most tenants have a car and drive everywhere because they have to go to work and pick up kids and buy groceries and do a lot of things that are just logistically simpler with a vehicle. 

 Your lease should describe what falls under abandonment and the remedies for such. There's a good chance your state has also already addressed the issue in your landlord/tenant laws.

 Amortization isn't legalized fraud - it's a way of giving the consumer a stable, consistent payment over the life of the loan. The alternative would be whopper payments on the front end, when the amount owed is significant, and very small payments later. 

Let's use easy numbers. You borrow $100k at 5% interest. Amortized over 30 years you pay $535 per month, or $6420 per year. That's based on the fact that you want to hold the note for 30 years. If you only wanted to hold the note for 10 years, you could make very large extra payments on your amortization loan. If you had a simple interest, open ended loan, if you paid $1000 per month it would take you about 10 years to pay it off. If you paid an extra $465 on your amortization loan every month, guess how long the loan would be? 10 years. 

You can run all of this on just a simple interest calculator and you'll get the same numbers. In my example here, in year one you owe about $420 interest per month on that loan. You're paying $535 so by the end of the year you've only paid off a little over $1000 on the principal. Now we start in year two, same thing you owe maybe $410 interest per month. And so on. If you decided to pay the loan off early after 1 year, you would owe close to $5k in interest on that loan, and you would have paid about $6k in payments, so of course you only get credit for $1000 of principal payments. 

 We are doing somewhat better than last year and our guests are reporting spending and enjoying a lot of time at the new Universal, but we are still down from 2022 and 2023. 

Marmora - awesome! Get a cheese steak at Kirks for me - best cheese steaks anywhere including the overrated tourist traps in Philly. There used to be an Amoco gas station in front of the WaWa next door to Kirks, I worked there in high school and remember when Kirk took over that pizza joint. I probably ate 3-4 cheese steaks a week from Kirk and always make a pilgrimage there when I'm in the area. 

 If you are local, meaning you can just drive over to OC, I would go straight into the RE booking offices there - there's a bunch of them - and talk to the brokers. I guarantee you any of them worth anything has a call list/waiting list for anything in OC/SIC/Avalon/SH . These 3 islands are super popular with different groups - Avalon & Stone Harbor are ritzy, OC is a little more family oriented, SIC is popular with younger people - and even though about every inch of every island is built out there's nowhere near enough supply for everyone that wants to stay in the summer. It wouldn't surprise me at all if you can get a better deal with a local broker than going through an online service, though you can also do that in conjunction with a local broker. 

Regardless of how you do it, unless you want to attract younger, partying demographics I wouldn't have anything less than a 4 night minimum encompassing the weekend. Most places there rent by the full week so you don't have dead days in the middle of the week. Once you are up and running, if you do a good job and get the right guests (families preferably), you will find the same people looking to book your same house at the same time every year. South Jersey Shore is a pilgrimage for a lot of Philly people looking to get out of the city for a week or two every year. When I lived there (in SIC) the population was about 2500 from Sep-May and about 20k June through August. In the summer you just walked everywhere because it was faster than sitting in gridlock in a car. We would see the same people in the same rental houses every year - in fact on one street (57th) every house on my block except ours was a summer rental, empty for 9 months. The wind would howl down the street in the winter because there weren't any cars anywhere.