All Forum Posts by: Manda Gouvion

@Peter Mckernan so it was all basically your money besides the mortgage! I'm impressed! That's what my husband wants to do. He wants to avoid private/hard money lenders and just go traditional on everything. But he hasn't read the book or researched nearly as much as me so he plans to get more educated and then we'll talk haha

@John Morgan We're definitely disciplined but I think I'd wind up putting the money I could be paying down the mortgages towards more properties... I'm not sure! I'm a HUGE numbers person so I'd probably run the math 4 times every other weekend to come back to the same decision. that's usually what I do with our finances lol when we were paying off $70k student loans that was basically my hobby was re-running numbers haha

@John Morgan Thanks! My husband is really pushing for doing 30 year notes just for more flexibility with monthly cash flow. I suggested having one 30 year mortgage for every 15 year mortgage so we have those 30 years paying for the 15 year ones. We're not too worried about boosting our income immediately since my husband loves his job (however it would be nice for him to work part time or something) but we'll just see. I think our first goal is to house hack. Currently we have baby #2 due in 3 months so I don't think we have any goals of doing anything for another 6 months which gives us a lot of time to save up and research! One problem we have though is whether or not we want to stay in Texas/how long we want to stay in Texas. How long do you have to live in a property before making it a rental without legal complications? Or how do you change the paperwork for when you move out?

@Andrew Postell How do you find the real estate investor groups? I requested to join two on facebook but I haven't like the vibe I got from one that's accepted my join request so far. 

Something else I'm getting the vibe of is that there's a lot of "pro" investors in Texas. I think I'm looking at long distance investing. It was actually my original idea was to invest in North Carolina. What are your thoughts on this?

@Account Closed this is fantastic advice and input. Thank you thank you thank you. Man am I thankful to have found this BP community! 

@Johnny Kang wow... I'm not one to believe in fate but dang! That's an inspiring story.

@Dana C. My dilemma is asking people for money. If there's one thing I've learned the hard way numerous times it's debt and family or friends don't mix. I think my best route is to find a community and find someone to invest with me that's already in the real estate world. I've reached out to two people I know yesterday but haven't heard back yet. I'm hoping to attend some local events and start making connections that way!

@Peter Mckernan dang that's awesome! Did you guys have cash you'd saved up or did you use lenders? How did you fund the rehab?

@Corey Hawkinson Yeah this market is tough. I'm not seeing a whole lot of great options where I'm from. That's another reason for my interest in Lon distance investing.

@John Morgan that's INCREDIBLE. Why did you choose to do 15 year notes? Do they cash flow at all right now? Every time I run numbers for 15 year mortgages we're negative a good -2k a year until it's paid off. I originally had wanted to do 15 year mortgages so that if I bought a property by the time each of my kids were 3 years old it would be paid off by the time they graduated HS but after seeing the numbers I didn't think we could swing that for 15 years for all of our kids (we only have 2 now but we'll probably have more)

@Andrew Freed oh man that's genius!! Can you use the equity of multiple homes together to fund a deal? Like say you pull a HELOC out of 5 rental properties that you originally put $20k down on for a total of $100K to cash purchase something? Our original plan was to put $20-$24k down on a rental property every year (this was when we didn't know of any other option than traditional real estate investing)

@Johnny Kang Thank you!! All of what you said is SOOO helpful! How did you meet this person?

@Andrew Freed This is fantastic advice, thank you. I have heard SO many people mention this book! I've never been interested though because I'm not a dad haha but now I have to read it. Can I ask how you invested in these units?