Looking for some advice

[Marco-Dane Samuels]

My wife and I finally purchased our first home. It was supposed to be our first rental property after a year of living there, and slight renovations done to the home to make it more appealing. However, the house needs a lot more work than what was expected. It needs a new HVAC, new flooring in the kitchen, and the water heater has to be replaced. On top of that, it doesn't have much places for storage. It's looking like we are going to have to purchase an outdoor storage for the home. The problem is I don't have the funds for the all the needed repairs. In all honesty, it's been very overwhelming, and stressful. My wife and I don't want to give up on our real estate journey when we've just started; however, it seems as if we bought a problem instead of a property without realizing. Does anyone have any advice on what our next steps should be? Should we stop focusing on using this property as a rental, and focus on flipping? If so, what should we focus on? Should we just give up on the house altogether? Any and all words advice is appreciated. TIA

[Preston Dean]

Hey Marco, 

1. Don't throw in the towel & give up. Use this pain to fuel you, don't let the pain/frustration go to waste

2. My wife and I were in your exact shoes a year ago. We purchased a house with the intent to live in it for a year and rent it out. Upon doing our rehab we had to replace the cold water pipes (the busted under the house), the hot water heater, the bathroom had to be totally renovated, we had to fix things in the kitchen. We came to the conclusion that we were going to have to put our RE dreams on hold for a while, while we lived in the house and slowly fixed everything over the next year.

We did not have a large chunk of change to fix it all up at once so we had to do it on a monthly basis every time we got paid.

2 years later we now have a cash flowing rental surpassing the 1% rule (renting out a property for 1% of the purchase price) and building equity while having the mortgage being paid down. 

Don't quit on your dreams maybe they just need to be delayed a bit and get things rent ready in a year from now!