All Forum Posts by: Melanie Lashus

 Thanks Bjorn!  Appreciate your feedback.   I read Brandon Turner's book on Managing Rental Properities and used all the BP advice on tenant screening - and it landed me amazing tenants in this first go round.  I'm hoping they'll stay for a couple years!  

If you have future events, I'd love to hear.  Thanks for organizing! 

Would love to be part of future events!  Thanks for what you're doing to organize! 

Background: I have a rental property that I self-manage with great tenants that is recently remodeled. I personally lived in this property for 3 years, and the tenants have been there for almost a year. I’m keeping an eye on the math to decide if I want to keep it as a rental property, or sell it in the next year or so and invest elsewhere... As one data point in my decision, I’m looking at cash flow. I also work a full time W2 job.

My Questions:

1. Once you have an adequate “reserve fund” in place (which I feel that I do), what expense items should still be calculated into the cash flow?

• I'm currently using: Cash Flow = Monthly rent – Mortgage – CapEx (5%) – Vacancy (5%) – Repairs (5%)
• However, besides the mortgage, I’m not really having regular expenses and so that set-aside money is just building up in the reserve fund (yay!).
• At this point, I feel the reserve fund would cover several months of vacancy and cover any major repair issue short of complete disaster (yes, I have insurance).
• At what point should I just consider the money I’m setting aside for CapEx, Vacancy, Repair as part of the cash flow? I want to use it toward something else – to buy more doors. (Obviously if I dipped in the reserves I would have to add that set aside back in for a while to re-build it…)

2. What do you consider an adequate “reserve” fund?

@Jonathan Taylor

Thank you!! That explanation was extremely helpful. I think I had been assuming “traditional” and “conventional” meant the same thing. This make much more sense.

@Jonathan Taylor

I’m very new to all this and am in the “educate thyself” phase. I currently own two properties.

I appreciate your offer of information!

What I *think* I understand:

- there are MANY ways to finance deals.

- small banks/etc can be more flexible in terms

- there is a limit (10?) to the number of bank mortgages a person can have.

What I’m confused about:

So much of what I read/listen to is experienced investors (with way more than 10 properties) talking about buying properties with a variety of creative financing strategies) and then “Refinancing” the property into a “traditional” mortgage later on.

So- what kinds of refi’s are these? Don’t they count against the 10(?) loans you can have?

What am I missing? This is never explained in the podcasts or books...