All Forum Posts by: Jeff Howard

good job Patrice I love finding houses with a bunch of junk in them a few trips to the dump and problem solved but it scares off most potential buyers it is a little hard or different living in the house you're working on but think about having additional light bill electric bill and mortgage payment you're talking several thousand dollars a month and if your husband's working full-time those months can add up very quickly plus pulling permits you're going to get a contractor to do that

The way that you're doing it you're going to have the biggest chance for success

If you want to see what it would look like doing it differently just take the amount of material cost and times that by 2 and that's how much contractors would cost if it was investment property and see if those numbers work for you

And also subtract your monthly carrying costs for the amount of months that you own the house and see what profit you end up with

You definitely won't make as much money butt if there's still a profit and you're happy with the amount then maybe you could switch

you have to run your numbers off of how much is it worth in the end and work back from there subtract repair cost carrying fees and that's how you can get your purchase offer I just bought a house that was listed for 100000 I put in an offer of 176000 and already have it under contract for 340000

But the market is inflating a bit too quickly a lot of people are overpaying stick to your numbers

about 4 years ago I came back from 2 year overseas mission trips without any money to invest and I did a 203k loan for the first deal and it went great it was a little complicated because you have to get quotes from contractors and things but it was manageable

On the next house I did a conventional loan

On the house after that I had enough to pay cash 

As a owner occupant sometimes you can put zero down and you can buy a house with the first look initiative before the investors start throwing around cash

It's best in the beginning 2 do a conventional loan as opposed to hard money because with a conventional loan you can stay in the house as long as it takes to get it done and you would have had your house mortgage payment anyways you're not losing money but with a hard money guy the clock is ticking

I use a site called foreclosure.com it cost about $40 a month so I cancel it as soon as I'm done buying a house because I'm cheap:-)

Finding a good realtor that deals in foreclosures is a great asset also some Realtors are good at selling expensive houses and some are good at finding cheap deals sometimes I use different realtors to buy and sell my properties

I do all the work on my houses myself it saves so much money doing it that way and I get to buy a lot of tools:-) the house that I have listed for sale now cost $70,000 of material if I would have had to pay contractors it would have cost $140,000 so it's a lot easier to find a profitable deal doing it all myself, and maybe a basic laborer that I paid $10 an hour

Hope this helps

Hi my name is Jeff I have been flipping houses for  a while now and the way that I found that works best for me and my family is to buy a fixer-upper and live in it while I'm working on it full-time there are many benefits for doing it this like pulling permits and tax benefits the house that I currently have under contract I worked on straight for 3 months listed it and I should net about 67,000 profit after 5 months all