All Forum Posts by: Rich Engelhardt

Ok - count my wife and I in for this.

We have been investors since 2002 & we are also members of the Lake Erie Landlords Association of Lorain County.

We look forward to being there and sharing some "war stories" with others.

Howdy Kathleen,

Right now we're all set with our rentals. We have to pay off the most recent one before we jump into another one. That's at least 4 years away at this point.

We'll keep you in mind though~ thanks for the welcome!

IMHO - there's no right or wrong way.

My wife and I chose to pay off as we went and keep our numbers low. We have 5 rentals now & all but the last one are paid for. It took from 2002 until 2014 to clear all of them off the books, but, now that we owe nothing on them, the money all goes into our bank account & not to the bank.

Others are going to have their own ideas and methods & what works for them.

I believe the goal you want is more important then the method you use to get that goal. We wanted a steady stream of income for our retirement with minimal risk & minimal overhead. Having 5 paid for rental houses, all single family 3 bedroom houses in nicer areas that generate about $46K a year in gross income, works well in our plans.

Sure, we could always expand that number, but, why? Our goal was to retire with as little loss in actual income as possible. We met our goal & have no desire to go any further at this point.

Hello all!

I'm  a new member here from the NE Ohio market. My wife and I started with our first rental back in 2002 after we had paid off our house. Without the deduction for the house, our taxes about ate us alive. A good friend of mine had faced a similar situation and his tax adviser suggested he invest in real estate. He did and so did we.

Well, one rental turned into two, then into three, then into four.

We took out a home equity loan on our primary residence and used that to finance our first rental. Since we both were working and had money to spare, we continued to pay our "normal"  house payment, along with the new payment for the new note and we threw the monthly rental money towards the equity loan. We managed to pay off the loan by 2005.

We bought our second rental in 2005, after taking out another equity loan on our primary, and again - - paid our "normal" mortgage payment, applied the rental from rental house number one towards the equity loan, made the normal equity loan payment and applied the monthly rent from rental number two towards the equity loan.

In 2006, we bought yet another rental - using an equity loan on rental property two.

That loan we threw the monthly rental money of the unit at.

In 2008, we had paid off the note on rental number two and began throwing more money at the loan for rental three.

In 2009, we bought rental number four and paid off the loan on rental number three later that year.

In August of 2011, I retired from my job as a computer network engineer/database administrator at the age of 59 1/2, and began to withdraw money from my IRA & 401, using the losses on the rentals to offset the taxes on the IRA & 401 distributions.

I had to use trial and error to guess how much to withdraw & be on the safe side as far as taxes go. $40K per year is roughly the "sweet spot" for that if you have 4 rental properties in the state of Ohio. YMMV in other locations & with other sources of joint income.

In 2014, when I turned 62, I began to draw social security. We paid off rental number four in August of 2014.

I had reached my goal, which had been to replace my working income with my retirement income. I was making $57K a year when I retired and my social security income of $21,600 and the combined rental incomes of $35460. totaled up to $57 K and change.

My wife retired in December of 2014 and as part of her retirement she got a one time distribution of $80K in an IRA, in addition to her monthly pension. Since that one time distribution reduced her monthly pension by $600, we decided to buy yet another rental to make up that difference. We again borrowed against our primary and bought rental number five in April of last year.

Anyhow that's a bit about me and a bit about how my wife and I got into the RE business.

We didn't do it to become wealthy, we did it just to generate and ongoing stream of revenue - which it has. By "pre-paying off" our properties, we are pretty much just drawing a monthly pay back of our initial investment over the course of the next 30 years.

It's a bit of a different strategy that, so far, has worked out well for us.