All Forum Posts by: Jerry W.

My farthest was Toledo Ohio, 1500 miles away.

@Alex Smith, I think you have heard the same answer again and again. price does matter. You have set criteria to buy a house in such a way that it is unlikely to cash flow. When you buy for cash flow you need to have cash flow. If you are buying betting on appreciation that is speculating. I cannot buy a property and rent it out and get cash flow. I have to find a problem property, or as I call it distressed, then I have to fix the problem that others do not want to address and then i can rent it out and cash flow. If all you are willing to buy is MLS listed turn key type properties you won't get cash flow. If it was that easy everyone would just go buy MLS turnkey properties and make huge piles of money.

Massive red flag, are you willing to walk away from the property taking nothing from your investment in ten years?  If so you can do it.  Why wouldn't they raise the rent to $10K a month if you are doing a really great business so they can take it over.  I would never buy a house and not own the property underneath it, never.  It is a lose lose proposition.  If you do poorly you make no money, if you do awesome, they raise the rent astronomically and take it all from you and you make nothing.

@Amy Leonard, in a way @Joe Splitrock is right and in a way he is wrong, it is not an open and shut matter.  Rules can vary from state to state, but in my state you put both incomes together and add all the kids up and come up with an amount of support that should be made.  Then you split the cost between both parties based upon the ratio of income between the 2 parties.  It gets more complicated on cases where custody is not equal.  Then you have to balance using the percent of custody time.  The biggest factor is clearly who makes the most money.  If the joint income of both is $5K per month and child support is set at $1,000 then is one parent is making $4K per month and one is making $1K per m onth one would make $800 per month in paymnts and one would make $200 per m onth.  If the person making $1K per month had primary custody, then they would get $800 per month from the other parent, if the one making $4K per month had custody they would get $200 per month from the other.  If it was 50/50 custody then the $4K parent would pay $400.  It varies from state to state.

  @Steve Hall I really don't think that @Matt M. was calling you out or implying you are a bad person.  He was simply trying to post a different view, it happens a LOT here.  He was in part pointing out that if your wife had custody of a child there would also be costs and would you call that a debt?  An interesting concept.  The same is true about deciding to have children, wow what an amazing amount of debt, but probably the best investment we will ever make.

As to my views on marrying debt I have been very blessed.  I was pathetically poor when I met and married my wife.  Still the most debt I ever had was the amount of the used car loan or trailer house loan of the property I was buying.  I even managed to avoid student loans until I hit law school.  Working 3 part time jobs kept my debt to under $8K for law school, and that includes having 2 children in the home.

You get what you pay for.  it may be nice to buy a great 4 plex for $100K and fix it up for $50K and get rents of $4,000 per month, but even if you had to pay $300K to buy it, it is still a good deal.  While debt is important, you have to make the biggest investment, your entire life be on the best property or person you can find.  When I only had $5 to buy my young son a birthday present my wife never complained about money, never once.  It doesn't matter if she had come with debt, she would have been worth it.  Now she will complain to me if I spend too much on a consumer item, despite that we can afford it.  The right person will work hard to pay off their debt, or yours, because they love you and want to do everything they can to make your life better.  The same had better be true for you, or they are making the bad investment despite you not having debt.  So in my long winded way , no I don't think marrying someone with debt of any kind is a bad thing if it is the right person.  If they are not the right person, well life is gonna suck.

Good thread.  Brought back lots of memories of some pretty hard times, makes me realize how lucky I was even then.

@Account Closed, you should be able to tell by a picture.  They look like a 2 story house with a another level stuck halfway in-between them off the side.  I have been working on one all day lol.  It is right next door to my personal house, a bi level.

@William Pratt, keep in mind that you still have to do cost and expense analysis-is.  To get $1,000 consistently a week you might need to buy a $600K or $800K property.  You probably won't do that consistently with a $200K property.  If can do that you have a much higher mortgage payment, higher property taxes, higher maintenance, massively more utilities, cost of furnishings, towels, sheets, and cleaners, handymen, groundskeeper, etc.  If you find a great one odds are 30 people will start one right next to you and try to get a piece of the pie.  Just like any other real estate, you must analyse it using real numbers, some of those numbers will be very hard to get.  Just because one VR is pulling down $4K a month doesn't mean you will.  Maybe they have 30 return customers every year you don't have, maybe they advertise on a website you don't know about, maybe 30% of their guests are fishermen from a friend who is a river guide.  There are a lot of variable.  By all means jump in, investigate, run numbers, and buy, but there is a lot more than meets the eye.

@Account Closed, so  two level house, 3 level house,and each of them are easy.  It is how many stories high they are, now if a house has the entrance in between the first and second levels I call that a bi level.  You have steps going up and down to each level as you enter.  A tri level to me is where you enter in the middle level, but there is a half stair going up to one level and a half stair going down to another level.  So the man level is halfway between between each of the other 2 levels.  Those are the only ones I have experience with.

I have always allowed dogs from the first day I started so I don't know the difference from not allowing pets.  So far I have never had a problem.  Occasionally I have a guest with a dog a when it is raining and get a little bit of a wet dog smell.  I keep mild air fresheners out and open the windows right away.  We don't get many rain days here though.  I have never had a problem with the yard being a mess or anything damaged.  The neighbors right next to my units have 2 little white poodle yapping dogs, and they have never complained about a guests dog to me either.

@Tyann Marcink, apparently BP won't let me send you a friend request, so I will hijack this thread a little to say that I will send you a message to learn more about Branson.  I think my family is more than ready for a vacation.

@Keith C., AIR B&B has been great at taking out lodging taxes but VRBO has never taken them out.  In fact their books are a nightmare.  We cannot reconcile what we get with what we are supposed to get.  We have come up with a way to deal with the problem, not perfect but it works.  I can imagine with VR property figuring out maintenance is tough.  I already have nearly 30 long term rental units so I am blessed to have some systems for getting painting and repairs done.  Other than putting on roofs I am not real proactive, but water heaters that develop leaks are changed within hours.  I am slightly worried about the possibility of there being a different reporting taxing for VR, at least as it applies to cleaning fees.  I routinely pay $20 per turnover for someone to wash sheets and towels, vacum floors, make beds, wipe off tables and counters, clean bathroom, resock paper products, and take out trash.  Hopefully I can show I spent it and not need to keep a line item for the possible different tax it might incur.