Your personal home strategy

[Jon Klaus]

Are you using your home for something beyond shelter and lifestyle choice? Is your home part of your real estate investing strategy?

Examples:
--You move fairly often to take advantage of the home sale tax exclusion of up to $250K/$500K.
--You live in a fixer and rehab it while you live there.
--You live in a unit of a duplex or quadplex and have your tenants pay the mortgage.
--You choose the part of the country you live in based on how you think it will do over the next few years.
--You borrow to the max at a low rate on your home, using the dollars that are freed up to buy investment properties.
--You rent for dirt cheap to free up funds for REI.

For me, it's land banking. I live on a ranch outside a big city, close to an interstate highway, hoping that land values will grow more quickly than home values. This with a realatively cheap cost of funds.

What's your personal residence strategy?

[Jeff S.]

It's the only way to go if you are resource short. Bought my first duplex fixer, moved in and cleaned it up, put owner occ financing on it and did it again with another duplex, lived in it for a year and then moved in to a fixer condo-cleaned it up and stayed a few years. Then bought a condo all fixed up, tired of living and fixing, but eventually turned it into a rental too. Bought another condo, light fixer, still there. Thinking of refinancing and renting it, and getting something in the foreclosure market. You guessed it, I am single with GF