All Forum Posts by: Stephen Moore

@Manuel Angeles I’ve spent about 75k on real estate education.

If I had no $ and was looking to get started I'd go to popular rental areas like Montrose, talk to independent owners, ask if they work with locators, and then post Apts for rent to Craigslist.

You can make $250-500/lease and it's pretty easy to do a few a weekend even if you work full time. That's an extra $3-4K/month. And you'd start to learn the market.

Does the freelancing make any money? Can you live off of it? How many units do you have and how much of that is leveraged? How much do you have in reserves now? What are your future prospects for employment?

There's a lot of questions you'd have to answer before you can begin to know what to do. If living off RE is the end game, then your RE needs to grow to the point of generating enough cash flow to pay obligations, maintenance, capital expense, your living expense, and general life reserves. For most people that's quite a bit of growth that has to happen before you have enough coming in. The general formula is: W2 pays your personal expenses + personal reserves + investing capital, RE investment reinvests into itself until it is an income generating business (and not just a self-sustaining enterprise). If you make 10 bucks an hour, you will probably be hammering at it for a long time. If you make $100k, you can probably make it work faster. 

As far as how much to have set aside in reserves: I like to have enough reserves to cover 1 one year of vacancy for each unit. After awhile, when we acquired enough homes and the reserve account got pretty fat, I've been less worried about this since it is highly improbable that all homes become vacant for one year at the same time; aside from that, only about 30% of our portfolio has any leverage on it - the rest is cash-owned, so the homes themselves are reserves of capital should the need arise. If everything you own has 75% LTV on it, that won't work, so you are going to need bigger cash accounts.

I should mention that I have a W2 (actually, I have *2* W2s) that I like, that brings in far more than needed for living, that I will retire from in a few years, so all of the rental business income goes to either reserves or back into the business as applicable. If you pump all your rental cash flow back into the business, you will be astonished how fast it can snowball into something pretty significant.