All Forum Posts by: Zorya Belanger

@Tomislav Glamuzina

For Smith Maneuver, I'd recommend reading the book. It's not the easiest thing to explain. 
Yes, it might make sense to get HELOCs from the beginning on all buy and hold rental property mortgages. With a rental property, you can right off the interest expense. On your personal residence, you can't right of the interest. BUT, if overtime you slowly turn the mortgage into a HELOC and use the HELOC to invest, you can write off that interest. That's the main concept of Smith Maneuver, and why it makes the most sense to have it on your personal residence. Not a bad idea for rentals, as then its a way to access equity in the future without having to refinance or sell.

Hi @Bryson Loov similar to Milo, I do know a few lawyers, but it depends a bit on what you're doing in real estate. So shoot me a DM and I can recommend someone.

Hey @Steven Vanderheide  You are definitely overthinking this! This is coming from an overthinking engineer. Totally agree with Taylor. You've done 10 years of research, go with your gut, trust yourself, choose something, like tomorrow, STICK WITH IT, and start taking steps to buy a property. Even if you bought one measly property 10 years ago, you'd have 10 years of mortgage paydown by now! And probably some good appreciation by now too! The strategy doesn't matter as much as taking action. You can adjust/change as you go. I had to get over this too. But once you start taking action (which does not mean learning or any more research) it gets easier to keep going.

Don't wait to buy real estate, buy real estate and wait! Wealth is made through long term buy and hold.

Also I was assuming we were talking about your personal residence. If its a rental property, you might want to refinance and pull the money out. 

Hi @Tomislav Glamuzina Getting a HELOC is a great place to start. It's the first thing we did when we starting learning about real estate, so we could access the equity in our home.

Sounds like you have a mortgage already? In order to get a Home Equity Line of Credit (HELOC) you will need to get a new mortgage product that has a HELOC component (unless your current one was set up with the ability to do that already, but likely it wasn't). To do that, you need to go through a refinance, so the process is the same as getting approved for a new mortgage.

I would refinance to get a HELOC, rather than refinance and pull out money in cash (notice that both these options involve a refinance). The main reason is that as you pay down the mortgage, that equity can be added to the HELOC and can be accessible. Otherwise, you would have to refinance again to access it. That is what is called a revolving HELOC or a re-advanceable HELOC.

ex. $1M property value, with a $500k mortgage remaining. You can typically refinance up to 20% LTV, so that's $800k. 800-500=300 is accessible. You get a new mortgage product that has a $500k mortgage component and a $300k HELOC packaged together.

By the way, a plain LOC is not secured by a property and not related to your mortgage. Typically the amount you can get is lower and has higher interest rate.

All that said, I'm not a mortgage broker, just someone who's gone through the process a couple times. I highly recommend talking on the phone with a mortgage broker, and ideally one who understands the Smith Maneuver. Wouldn't hurt to read the book on the Smith Maneuver yourself - I wish I knew that from the beginning.

interested

 Yes, that's a good book to start with! Raising capital or partnering with someone is one way, but you have to bring something to the table too, so you need to learn everything you can and be the expert and put in all the time.

@Dominik Hekiert There's no perfect timing to start filling out a basic mortgage information form for a investor-focused mortgage broker; it's something you can do now. Then they can help you figure out where you stand and/or what you need to do to qualify for what you want. Let me know if you need a recommendation for one in Ontario.

@Ernesto Miguel Credito use COVID to your advantage! Now its easier than ever to attend real estate investor meetings because they are all online!

Hi @Ernesto Miguel Credito Just know that there are many many successful investors in or from Saskatchewan, who also started with little to no money, so you CAN do it too! ex. Russell Westcott, Edna Keep

Great advice from Chris above. Ditto for me - if you want to connect and see if we can add value, let's do that.

I'd recommend reading Real Estate Investing in Canada, and joining the "reigs real estate investors group saskatchewan" on facebook.