Hello From Woodstock Georgia

[Ivan Marsh]

Hi Everyone,

Just wanted to introduce myself, I have been listening to a lot of BP podcasts in the last year or so and finally got around to joining the forum.

About myself,

We moved to Atlanta fresh out of college for my first 9-5 job in 2015, and found a house to rent from someone local here who rented out the top half of the split level to me and my spouse, and the bottom to someone else. They had it setup so that both halves had independent everything except laundry which was shared access on sort of a landing in middle of the two halves.

Fast forward a year and we were expecting our first child and really wanted our own place to move into, being recently graduated and not having much in the way of savings I took inspiration from our landlord at the time and decided to pursue trying to find a home that would allow us to do the same thing he was doing I didn't know it was called house hacking or whatever at the time. We scrapped up every penny we had, took out a small $5,000 loan against my 401K for the downpayment and got approved for an FHA loan on a house and began looking. After looking at around 70 homes and making offers on several, but failing to get them we finally had an offer accepted.

The house we found was a 5 bedroom 3 bath house, that was split level and had a small bar kitchen on the ground level. Immediately after closing I hired a contractor who I later found out wasn't even licensed and caused me some problems long term, but anyhow lesson learned on that. I did manage to get the contractor to complete the work needed, adding a laundry, and expanding the kitchen area some to make it more of a real apartment. Ending up with a 1Bedroom, 1 bath apartment we could rent, with 4 bedrooms and 2 baths for ourselves. We closed in Sept, and had our first tenant by November. We did a 1 year lease with some help from a friend who was a lawyer to iron that out, and had continuous tenants from that time until the end of 2020 with rent at 900 per month utilities included. We went through 3 different tenants in that time and discovered that Zillow rental manager is a really good way to find solid tenants, using that we never had any gaps in tenant usually with the prior tenant and new tenant moving out and in on the same day.

At the end of 2020 our current tenant at that time passed away she was elderly and died of cancer sadly. Unfortunately due to her declining health and ability to get around she left things in a bit of disrepair flooring was especially bad carpets ruined etc. We also had twins in February of 2021 and with all of that we decided that we would put renting on hold since we didn't need the money with my current salary and the apartment needing some repairs.

Fast forward to now and we have been so busy with life that we are just now getting around to fixing up the issues and trying to figure out next steps. We really want to move out of our subdivision to a property with more land for our kids, and keep our current home as a rental. What I haven't figured out yet is if I want to try and rent it to two different families or just one. Just one is less headache, but two would be more income. The downstairs apartment is not separately metered and shares the HVAC with the upstairs. There are no controls for the HVAC in the apartment, but we kept things at a reasonable temperature and never had any complaints. I'm just unsure about dealing with those two things if we went with two tenants. The house we rented when we first moved here had shared utilities but separate HVAC all utilities were in our name as the "primary" tenant and we were responsible for splitting them each month with the other tenant. In our current situation with being the landlord as well as the other tenant we just did a flat rate and it was a lot less hassle, but I can't really expect someone else to do that since they aren't the owner.

Anyhow I've been listening to a lot of BP podcasts as I try to figure out our next steps and what to do, we have gone to see several properties but so far nothing has clicked. We want space, but also I really want to buy something where I can add value to it in some way as well. We took out a large equity loan to put towards this new property and found a lender to work with but the right property so far hasn't come up.

I see properties all the time I think that would be great properties for investment, but since I'm currently looking for a new primary residence as well I'm going to have to put that on hold until I get the primary residence issue sorted.

Sorry for the long read, I just wanted to introduce myself and see whats happening on the forums. Looking forward to learning from and sharing with all of you.

-Ivan