All Forum Posts by: Scott Pigman

On the off-chance that you're not just trolling; I'm not the most experienced landlord here but I'm pretty sure that there aren't too many cases anymore where a landlord just outright says, "Sorry, but Blacks/Gays/Jews/whatever aren't welcome here." Discriminate all you want but if one of those rejected tenants ever files a complaint you better hope you can document a legal reason why you chose someone else.

Ann Arbor is pretty pricey. It'll be a challenge to find something there that makes sense. I'm considering Ypsi myself. 

Yikes, that's a nasty commute. If I was you I'd be looking to invest in my quality of life by finding a home closer to work or a job closer to home first.

Go Blue!

If I'm reading that correctly you can provide a service that answers the tenants' phone calls, fixes those 2 AM toilets, collects rent, files eviction notices, etc without a license as long as you don't actually place tenants, advertise the property, or draw up the lease. For that I guess either the owner could do that themselves or hire a Realtor (tm) for that one specific task.

Somebody tell me if I've got that wrong.

Also, what is the distinction between "leasing" and "renting"? Is renting month-to-month as apposed to a long term lease?

Part of the attraction of the BRRRR strategy that Brandon and Josh talk about is that if it's executed properly it gets you around the 20% down requirement. The catch is that you have to be willing to initially pay all cash, borrow from your rich uncle, get a hard money loan from a guy working out of the back room of a laundromat, or pay with a credit card. The goal is to buy it cheap and increase its value to the point where you can refinance at 75-80% LTV and get all of your money out.

The list of celebrity-endorsed real estate guru courses that don't follow that exact same structure is as follows:

And that's it

Exactly. My experience: 

First call, the capacitor was blown. They decided that it was because the filters were dirty from the renovation work we had done and therefore not covered. So I pay $300 to have them replace the capacitor to get it working for a couple of months.

Second call: guy comes out, looks around. Doesn't even go in the attic. He decides that the problem is a bad circuit breaker -- which they don't cover.

So I replace the breaker. start the system up. It runs for a few minutes and then the breaker trips. And then the compressor blows up venting 10 pounds of R22 straight into the atmosphere. That heat bubble over the US? Yeah. That was me. My bad.

I don't know, but I can tell you that I'm sitting here in house in Austin, TX sweating like crazy ever since my AC blew up and the home warranty that the seller paid for isn't doing much to help. The minimum bill to get the system working is about a bit over $2,000, but no one will guarantee the work because of other problems with the system. To get the system fixed right is closer to $8,000. 

The home warranty is paying out $800 because they've deemed the problem to be caused by improper installation by the last crew to work on the system (long before I bought the house). They just barely cover the cost of replacing the R22.

So keep the warranty if you want, but don't delude yourself by thinking that there's any certainty that they'll actually cover you when something fails. They might,but it's gamble. 

I suggest you make saving up an emergency fund your main plan.

I've often wondered what @Brandon Turner and @Joshua Dorkin really think about Kiyosaki. On the one hand he's written probably the most popular book for real estate investors. On the other hand he's about par with Charlton Sheets in the Guru racket.

I second the nomination for Gallinelli's book. I picked it up last month and it's full of practical information on how to "run the numbers". Just the chapter on how to use the IRR/MIRR functions was worth the cost.

Then again, if you have a background in accounting it's probably kid stuff.

I second the recommendation to use the Dave Ramsey approach to get out of debt. Pick up The Full Money Makeover or Financial Peace (free at the Library!). We had about the same amount of student loan and credit card debt when we decided to go the full Ramsey --- debt snowball, cash expense envelopes, the works -- and it was worth it. Now the only debt we have are the mortgages.

Lots of people here dislike Ramsey's no-debt/no-leverage approach when it comes to investing in real estate, and to be honest I'm not fully on board with him there either. But while you're trying to eliminate the consumer debt Dave's right on the money. (see what I did there?)

If you can increase your income by wholesaling (without charging anything to the credit card while doing it) go for it.