All Forum Posts by: Jerry W.

Nice post @Matt Jones.  I agree with nearly everything you said.  I had paid my house off, had no vehicle loans, and no credit ard debt, then last year decided to get a new truck and a new house hehe.  Still I was able to afford it as I drove the same truck for 27 years.  I had buckled down in 2014 and 2015 because I saw a real recession coming to my state and I was right.  I did push the envelope on expanding this last year but still not as much as I could have.

As to what takeaways I have from the last 6 weeks, we are not as smart as we think we are.  There is always something new we didn't plan for.  Other folks are often no smarter than us, and lady luck can be seductive and cruel as well.  Use your head, be aggressive, but be smart.  I would probably act the same way again that I did right before the pandemic with the same facts.  We can never predict the future.  Do your best, stay true to your values, and take care of those you love.  Yes and cash reserves make you sleep better at night.

Hmm, I don't know where to start.  First I agree, the cheese was wonderful, but the powdered milk was horrible.  I agree the victim mentality that drives the rent strike is what keeps most of these folks down.  They are the ones wanting free health care, free college, free rent, free food, free phones, government programs to pay utilities, etc.  Wyoming usually has really good employment.  We are being hurt right now, but usually it is good.  There are slums in many of the bigger cities where employment is horrible and a lot poor folks are trapped.  Wyoming believe it or not has some slums.  Look at the Indian reservations.  There are some really smart enterprising folks who are making a go of it and are getting ahead on the reservations.  They are keeping their heritage and improving their lot and their children's.  There are also those stuck in their victim mentality.  They live in free housing and live for parties and free handouts.  Many can barely read or write.  I have seen beautiful houses reduced to wrecks in only a few years with folks tearing out the inside wood to burn in the wood stove, cutting a hole in the bathroom wall so the horse could drink out of the bathtub, (in fairness he was drunk when he did it), piles of empty booze bottles almost as high as the junk cars.  Something for nothing never works.  You can never expect someone else to be in charge of making your life good.  We have more opportunities in this country to get ahead than in nearly any other country.  Yet many dwell on what they don't have.  Having a corporation make a lot of money is not an excuse to take money from another person unless they cannot get a job or food to feed their family.  Desperate people will do horrible things, but lazy people will too.  At least the slums on the reservations are owned by the tribes.  They work really hard at keeping the housing nice, it has improved a LOT since I lived there in the early 1960s.  You want real slums to form around you now?  Just quit paying rent.  Landlords will quit fixing broken windows, and furnaces, and replacing broken doors long before they quit paying the mortgage.  Instant slum if enough folks do it.  It is the culture and mindset that has to change to get ahead.  I have worked with some truly useless indians on jobs that had a quota of indians required to be on it, I have also also worked with some dam good workers who were indians that were getting ahead.  Most but not all of them had left the Reservation for awhile and had to learn to get by without handouts.  End results they saw the cycle of victim mentality and were able to break it.  I had some really good friends on the reservation growing up.  The change in mentality as they grew up is startling.  Some kept the victim mentality, some did not.  Still it takes a catalyst to cause change.  I don't want to see anyone suffer, but the really tough folks who survive and proper had to suffer to toughen up.  I think our nation and its people will toughen up and surprise a lot of folks who see us as the soft spoiled americans, but we can surprise ourselves.  We will also have the rent strike folks who will never learn and stay trapped in the victim mentality, and there will be rich folks who will support them and say poor thing, it's not your fault.  Until you have to work for it, and earn it and toughen up a free handout seems pretty good.  The rent strike folks may learn, but may end up being bigger losers than they are now, but the tough ones will find a way to prosper, like many of the small landlords who started with nothing.  While I came from very modest means I was also blessed to be taught to have a strong work ethic that has served me well.  I was always told that I could do better for myself and make it.
No one has the right to get money from someone else or to expect the government to make it all better.  The government is trying to keep folks from dying.  We will all suffer from this shutdown, but we still have a huge safety net our parents and grandparents never had.  We need less whining and more working.  They have to lift some restriction in order for folks to get back to working, but the majority have unemployment and stimulus money.  It's after this shutdown ends that we separate the wheat from the chaff as my father calls it.  
I am not attacking anyone, and this may be offensive to some folks, but it is my observations.

@Christopher Kolasa, just so you know most forms of formal retirement plans are exempt from attachment including bankruptcy. In Wyoming the annual cost of an LLC is about $50 per year until you get over a million in value.

@John Stapleton, sorry no good answer because of a vague question.  The type of furnishings and decor may make one VR do much better than one next to it.  A beach condo might do twice as good as one a block away just on location, there are way to many variable to guess here.  Size can make a difference, number of bedrooms, price, paint color lol so many factors.  Study the local markets , how are they they doing?  Right now you need one that will cash flow as a LTR because right no VRs are dead.

I have a couple STrs in a drive to market to Yellowstone, and we get some here as a destination town.  My bookings like many went to zero.  I have had one hardy fisherman, and someone moving here who needs 2 nights to to wait for their home to be unloaded by the moving company.  I had a regular repeat customer set for tomorrow for a 2 week stay.  He was going to self quarantine per our states rules for the 2 weeks  and only go out and fish by himself for 2 weeks.  My state game and fish department got smart and cut off sales of fishing licenses to out of state fishermen.  This guy even had ups sending in frozen meals so he did not have to go to the grocery store.  It probably helps that my town has not had a reported case of COVID 19 yet.  Still every one of my bookings has canceled until late May, even some of my summer ones are cancelling now.

@John Stapleton, I am not sure that you asked enough of a question to give you an answer. A STR can be any type of home. My current STr is a duplex. Each is furnished very differently and each seem to draw different crowds.

@Anton Ivanov, thank you for the article and the research that you put into it.  Folks reading this should give you a vote for providing the information for this.

I just bought 2 houses this year to convert into STRs. I have made them into LTRs instead hehe. I had the STRs help me though a really bad February in my LTR business, now the STR has died. Nothing lol.

To be honest I am so dam busy I don't know what to do.  The thing I hate most about all of this is not seeing my grandkids every other day.  I have 4 houses that are in the need fixing up stage.  I was very happy that I just rented a big house out yesterday, but discovered today I rushed too much.  The tenants explained that they were newly married, she had been living with her dad as she has 4 kids, but he is an over the road truck driver and his rental history was good.  Found out today she had been evicted for an absolutely trashed filthy house.  I have had houses open for 4 months and just didn't take enough time to do the background check right.  One of the folks I called to ask about her finally called back today.  I doubt I will evict them after only being in the house for 2 days, but I am tempted.  Got a certified check before move in.  The house has 1800 square feet but desperately needs new flooring and I was so happy to save putting 6K into new flooring.  I have 2 more houses left to fix up to rent, and I have one more I had offered to buy that I need to do paperwork on.  then I am doing roofs until I drop.  Only 16 more to do, sigh.  The hailstorm from last year could have been timed better.
We are hard hit with both the virus and the oil drop.  I normally am pretty aggressive at fixing up houses and doing improvements.  I think I will back off on that a bit and start saving up a bit.  The good news is my banker called this morning and said they are offering a 2 month deferral on payments with no penalty and no questions asked.  I declined, but gathered that some had taken it.  Unfortunately my day job is beginning to demand a lot of my attention and it is pretty stressful.  then next month I start filing for some retirement benefits.  So far that is the only benefit to being old right now.

@Nathan Gesner, our courts are not prohibiting evictions of privately owned property at the moment, but it is complicated.  They are only doing essential court which is similar to folks in jail needing to see a judge, but you can still file eviction papers, have them served, and ask for a court date.  You may got a date, or not.  Most likely you will have it set for a teleconference and have it set 30 days down the road instead of the 1 week we have grown used to.