Doing Work Yourself vs.....

[Bryan P.]

I bought my rental property for 22,000. I've been working on this sucker for 5 months after work, 3-4 hours per night and some weekends. Luckily I've only had to pay for 2 months of holding costs. I'm finishing up this week and will have put around 5,000 into the place, plus my own labor (whatever that is worth).

So now I think to myself, what if I just bought a place for 27,000 and didn't do any work to it?

Any thoughts on this? What are considerations when doing work yourself vs. buying a rental that has the equivalent of the total cost, as I've mentioned above?

-Bryan

[Mitch Kronowit]

It's all a trade off. You have to determine what the best use of your time is and figure out what is worth paying to have done for you and what you should be doing yourself.

For example, I recently spent about $80 to have a handyman replace the fan motor in the bathroom of our rental condo. To do it myself would have involved me gathering my tools, driving over an hour to the condo, figuring out what kind of motor I needed, locating and picking up the motor, then swapping it out and driving all the way back home. Just wasn't worth me doing myself.

Now, in comparison, a few months ago I had to fix the security screen door on one of our units. Purchasing a new one and having it installed for me would have easily been $400 or more. But loading my wire-feed welder and a few tools into the back of my truck, driving over there, fixing the screen door, and returning home was about half a day. Is there something else I could have done in that half day that would have netted me more than $400? I don't think so. Besides, I love to weld, so this was the best use of my time.