All Forum Posts by: Justin Sheley

@Johnny Situ I will be reconstructing my cards after they first 12 month period of zero interest is over, but my long term strategy is to refinance the property I have just rehabbed and pay back the card that I used in full. 

Real life example: I just finished the rehab on a house I bought for 30k. I did a 20k rehab on the house and used my 0% interest cards that I obtained through F&G. I listed the house for rent yesterday, and once I have a tenant in place I will begin the refinance process. The comps right now show that the house should be worth 75-85k. So I will refinance the property as soon as I can and repay the 20k back to the CC companies. I will then have a rental property that cashflows each month with no personal money tied up in it, and 25-35k in equity. @Benjamin Centeio, you are absolutely correct, having an exit plan an the ability to refinance is key to this.

@ Justin Young In order to avoid that I setup my wife with a cash app account and transferred from my account to my wifes. The first time I did it, I got a fraud alert from Chase and they canceled the transaction, but I went online and accepted the transaction as legit and then I haven't had a problem since. Fund & Grow does provide a packet with info on how to turn your credit into cash, however many of the options are very credible in my opinion. The downside of using the cash app is that you can only do $2500 a week. So if you need to free up $100k it would take 10 months to free up the cash, which obviously kinda destroys the usefulness of it. I'm using my credit currently to do a 15k rehab, so it hasn't been to bad for me, but otherwise I'm pretty disenchanted with the F&G strategy. I don't regret giving it a shot, because how else would I learn, but I'm not sure I'll be using it again after this current house is finished.

@James Dodson I'm not sure if there is a minimum credit score, but the amount you can get is mostly based on credit score. However, F&G does offer a credit repair program as well to get people's credit score up.

I haven't started the process of removing the inquiries. I really need to get going on that. I was experiencing some trouble turning my credit into cash. Although I'm currently using my funds for a rehab, I soon realized that I can't pay my roofer, AC guy, other other misc jobs with a credit card. Buying supplies was easy, but I needed to turn some of the credit into cash. So I looked into convience checks, but my cards wouldn't issue those to me. So I signed up for an account to buy gold. But to be honest, I just had trouble moving forward with that strategy. Just got a bad feeling, although it probably is a legitimate way to do it. Ultimately, at 3:30am it came to me to just transfer money to myself using the cash app. I added my credit card as a funding source and was able to send the money to myself that way. Downside is it's a 3% fee. So my $4500 transfer cost me $135 in fees.

We also had an exciting moment as we finished our first BRRRR on another home.

Purchase: $40,000

Rehab: $1500

Rents: $950

Appraised: $74,000

Refinanced: $43,000

We plan on using our credit from F&G to do this again with the property I'm currently working on. Pretty amazing as I begin to learn this business how these deals can work out. Definitely gives a bright hope for the future!

So I need to clear the air a bit with Fund & Grow. I had reached a pretty frustrated level with my rep their, and although I don't regret getting the line of credit, I was beginning to regret the company I chose to do it with. I mentioned it before but I had not received a reply to an email in over a month, and I thought I was being smart by looking in my junk mail box in gmail as well. However, as I was literally on hold to talk to my F&G rep, I opened my trash to clear it out, and wouldn't you know it was a reply from Robert Moran for every email I sent him. He was just as confused as I was, as to why I wasn't receiving his emails. So although he probably will never see this forum, I do feel like I owe him an apology. I don't understand why in the world those email would go straight to my trash. The only thing I can think of is that I had been consistently deleting the more "spam-ish" emails that F&G has been sending me. (Side note, these emails are as if their program doesn't know I've already paid for and utilized their program). So perhaps my gmail was trying to be "smart" and automatically trash messages from them. I really don't know. Regardless, that issue was cleared up, and I was relieved to know that I was not actually getting the cold shoulder.

So at this point I do have the instructions on clearing inquires from my credit report, so I'll update you guys on how that goes. And although I am also so curious about the turing the credit to cash methods, I actually have the perfect BRRRR project right now that I'm going to use the cards for the rehab, so I don't need to worry about the transfer into cash.

@Maurice Colbert

Yeah it's really frustrating. The good news is that I have a good situation right now to use the business lines of credit to my advantage, and I wouldn't have this opportunity without those funds. I am left wondering if I could have just done it myself. But to me it was worth having someone there to help me through the process. That is why this lack of communication has been extra frustrating.

@Donny Aldo

At this point I'm pretty disenchanted with F&G as a company. My official representative was Robert Moran, and he has not returned an email to me in over a month. When I call in, he's always busy and I end up talking to some sort of receptionist. She assured me that Robert had not received my emails and I must have the wrong email. This is not the case, as my emails to him were part of an email thread where we had spoken back and forth previously. 

Regardless, she said she could send me the attachments for inquiry removal in the next 5 minutes. That was 2 days ago.

So needless to say, I'm not thrilled. I hope they can somehow salvage themselves with me and actually provide customer service, but it's not looking good.

The only contact I've had directly from my F&G rep in the last month was a voicemail asking me to do a video testimonial for their company.

So here's an update on how things with Fund and Grow are going for me.  I haven't gotten a reply to an email with my F&G rep in about 2 weeks. I am supposed to be getting instructions on liquifyig the cash and removing inquires, but have not received that guidence yet. So I haven't attempted it on my own yet.

I've been less than thrilled with the customer service after the few initial calls. I know I'm going to make the most of this interest free money, but the jury is definitely still out on if it was worth the upfront cost. 

I did however just get a house under contract that is going to be a perfect house for the BRRRR method. So I will be using my 29k in business credit lines for the rehab and then refinance the property. So that 29k for rehab should work out nicely for my business.

@Maurice Colbert

I would definitely suggest you create an LLC in addition to what Fund & Grow is doing. I know there is a lot of posts on this site abut when to create an LLC and how to do it.

I have the cards from my first round at F&G, but have not successfully turned them into cash. I may not end up evening using them for cash, but instead might use them to cover rehab expenses. Then refinance once the project is complete. I just haven't found the right home that needs a large rehab yet.

@Jaye Seay I've received $29,000 so far. I was hampered by the fact that I'm in the process of using another card to cover a homes renovation and I haven't refinanced out a paid down that existing debt. So that hurt my first round of business credit.