All Forum Posts by: Soh Tanaka

Regarding to owning a property free and clear, what often people don't take into account is since there's a lot of equity, it's easier to become a target of a lawsuit. Also, it's not safer during the downtime just because you don't have a mortgage. For example, if you have $100,000 and buy a $100,000 house, you have no cash and will be in a bad shape when a downtime comes. But if you just put $20k down, you have to pay a mortgage, but you have $80k cash. That's a better situation to be, IMO.

@Katie Harlow - I'm excited that Cozy got into tracking the expense, but as you know, it has a long way to go. Are you in charge of developing that portion of the software? I would love to give you some feedback. 

Buy a property (get a mortgage) under your name, and then, if needed, transfer the property to LLC.

Just curious, how much is the property tax and insurance?

I'm not necessarily recommending, but what some people do is to transfer the title from LLC to yourself, refinance, then transfer the title back from yourself to the LLC. After you do that, technically the bank can come at you and ask you to pay off the mortgage, as you transferred the title, but I never heard or read of that happening.

I didn't listen to the podcast, but to the best of your knowledge, what do you think the podcast is trying to say? 

Even if you do so after you move, it needs to be capitalized, which means you can deduct the cost over 27.5 years. Check with your accountant though. 

It's not something you have to do right now, but if I were you, I would diversify in a different area. This is just how I feel, but there are too many things going on in this country that in any given moment, any town/area could have some significant issue that could affect your portfolio negatively.

I am somewhat in similar situation like you. What I would do is to have one regular LLC (NOT series) in IL, and put all your IL properties in it. Then get another regular LLC (NOT series) in IN, and put all the IN properties in it. Generally speaking, having one LLC per property is considered a bit of an overkill.

Thanks for sharing the stories guys. We hear a lot of success stories, but the truth is we all go through some tough times (and done things right, we will be ahead at the end of the day). By reading other people's stories, we can put our bad time in perspective knowing that this is just part of the game.