All Forum Posts by: Russ Roslewski

Hello, I enjoy reading the advice on this forum.

My wife and I have owned two rental properties in the OKC area for the last several years. Our rental property insurance is with USAA, who also has our homeowner's insurance (and auto policies).

In August we bought another rental property. USAA would NOT insure this property due to our "claim history". In May 2013, a tornado came close to both properties and resulted in damage resulting in two claims (nothing as major as you think - just re-shingled roofs. Our bad luck - the properties are about 5 mile apart). Their policy, according to their representative, is that if you have 2 claims in the past 36 months they will not place any additional policies with you (but will keep current policies). The fact that we're talking about 2 claims spread among 3 properties (2 rentals and our primary residence) did not matter, it was handled the same as 2 claims against 1 property.

Okay, so we contacted some other insurers and finally settled on State Farm. We identified the situation to the agent, who said it would be no problem, and he wrote the policy. A few weeks later we get a letter from State Farm itself, saying it has denied our policy and it will be canceled in a few weeks.

Is this normal? How can you own multiple rental properties and NOT have a couple of claims every once in a while? USAA does have an agreement with a third party company, but they were much more expensive for much less coverage. I guess we may just have to go with that until May 2016, when we hit 36 months.

Any wisdom or additional ideas?

Thanks,

Russ

At the beginning of last year we owned one single-family home as a rental property, in another state. Last summer, my wife traveled there to look for another property to purchase, found one, and we bought it. She also stopped by to check on our existing property.

Are any of her travel expenses associated mostly with looking for a new house to buy and rent out deductible? She was there for 5 or 6 days, and I'm sure she would say there's no way it could be considered a "pleasure" trip.

If not, can I deduct some portion of the expenses, since she did check on our existing house? How would I calculate that?

Thanks.

We own a house that we were living in, but converted to a rental property in 2010.
We moved out of our house on Nov 18, 2010.
The tenants moved in on Nov 26, 2010.

To prepare the house to rent, we made several repairs, from filling in nail holes in the wall to getting a plumber to repair a sillcock outside.

I know repairs made after the tenants moved in are deductible.

Question 1 - if we made repairs before we moved out (Nov 18) to prepare the house to rent, are they deductible in any way?
Question 2 - how about after we moved out, but before the tenants moved in?

Thanks!

Help, I am a little confused.

We just moved out of town in November and rented our house out starting at the end of the month. So it will have been rented out for about 5 weeks of the year, with a total rental income for the year of about $1400.

In order to rent the house, we had to repair the driveway to the tune of about $5000. I have been reading through Pub 527 but can't figure out if I can deduct from my rental income the whole $5000 (and if I can carry over the remaining $3600 into the next tax year), OR if I can only deduct about 9% of the $5000 since we lived in the house about 91% of the year.

Anywhere I can look for guidance?

(Yes, I am trying to find an accountant but we're new in town.)

Thanks,
Russ