All Forum Posts by: Aaron Taylor

To some degree when you're talking about content providers and guests you're limited by the ratio of people actually doing the stuff you're trying to focus on.  For example, in one of my electical engineering classes in college there were 60 students and zero women.  Most engineering classes were at a ratio of 30 to 1, so if I were to hear reports on the subject I would expect it also to be along the same 30 to 1 ratio.

I don't know what the ratio is in the investing space but I'd guess it's heavily weighted towards men while the realtor space might be heavily slanted towards women.  I think on their money podcast the ratio is a lot more even just because saving money is something that everyone is interested in.

I guess what I'm saying is I don't think anyone is intentionally including or not including someone based upon anything other than their knowledge.

Fortnite really isn't my favorite because I'm too old to build stuff as fast as everyone else.  Aiming is no problem though, so typically I just try and bushcamp until there are only 2 other people besides me.  When they're fighting it out and one finally takes out the other, I pop out of the bush and take out the last guy.  :)  My goal is to not fire until I have to.  I would guess that in most matches I'm probably the 80th to 90th best player out of the 100 but I've managed to win 3 times despite that, lol.  My kids are way better than me at Fortnite.

Overwatch is what I play a lot of online while working out on the elliptical machine.  Yes, on the elliptical machine.  When I'm on voice chat I think it adds an air of realism because I actually sound like I'm tired running around in the game.  The matchmaking in Overwatch though is not very good, too many times you win 10 in a row and then lose 10 in a row just based upon who they pair you with.  I've gotten up to 2600 something in ranking but can't seem to get past that.

My wife liked:

Rich Dad, Poor Dad

Cashflow Quadrant

Set for Life

Yeah, where I'm at (southwest part of KC, Kansas side) the market is VERY strong for sellers.  KCMO, not as much, which is where all the out of state buyers are buying.  

This whole discussion is very interesting. It seems like people are talking from very different markets. I have very rarely seen a property on the MLS that would cash flow at the listed price in my area. If I was to take the advice from the some of the posters in this thread, I would have never made an offer. Comps are a crapshoot half the time because older houses are often radically different from one other in upgrades and functionality, plus listings claim all kinds of things as bedrooms which aren't.

What also comes into play is this meet in the middle philosophy which most negotiations devolve into.  If you want to get a 100k property at 90k, you can't just offer 90k because the seller will typically counter with 95k and not move below that.  If you offer 80k you may offend the seller or you may just be able to meet at 90k.  I'm not trying to piss off the seller, but if I offered 90k out of the gate I'd have no wiggle room left.

There's a whole book on the negotiating thing and it basically says to that make a deal, you have to make both sides feel like they won a little.  It's pretty hard to do that unless you start out lower than you're willing to go, which also means that might upset some sellers unintentionally.

My agent is actually more aggressive than I am on offers, there are houses he's wanted me to offer on but I've kind of passed temporarily because I don't think enough time has passed for them to actually think about it (basically houses that will never sell at the listed price and are 10's of thousands away from what I think they'll actually bring).  I just wait on those to drop some rather than make a low offer.  

The weird ones are the standstills.  You know the houses where you've negotiated but you're still a few thousand apart.  Those are the funny ones because it becomes a test of wills evidently.

It's unlikely that the air filter by itself caused the system to fail UNLESS it caused the system to literally freeze up and not work while they tried to run it for multiple days (basically, air flow not getting through causing freezeup) It was old, it was going to happen at some point.

I ran into this one time, lady owed slightly less than what the house was worth, but the house also needed work.  I looked into assuming the loan but their interest rate was just awful, lol.  There just wasn't a good way to make it work.

I think the reason people say "Cash flow is king" is because if your property value drops by 20% and rents decrease some, at least you'll still be able to pay for the property mortgage.  If your cash flow is break even and the market tanks, if you're over leveraged you're in trouble if you don't have a big source of income as now you've got money going out to all those mortgages all of a sudden instead of coming in.

It's kind of like having a job with normal life expenses...do you want to have a job where it just barely covers expenses with the chance for a huge bonus, or one that exceeds it by a bit with a smaller bonus potential?  Sure, you can probably get ahead faster with the big bonus, but the second job position is less risky overall in the event of the bonus going away (or even eating your salary like in 08).

Also, there has been some talk about rent bubbles in some cities lately, so in that case your higher cash flow would provide some protection for that.

I don't know where your particular property is in Kansas, but small towns are fine IF one of these things is happening:

1)  You're close enough to a major city where they're pulling your values up with them.  So you're getting appreciation along with cash flow, although the appreciation may make finding cash flow harder.

2)  You're getting major cash flow that well exceeds all repairs, huge cash on cash return.  Appreciation is zero.  Possibly even slightly negative.

My guess is that the house you're renting is one of the biggest in town, which means it also has big repairs to go along with it.  I would think it would start getting better after a while.  Doesn't sound like the rehab would be worth it, pretty hard to flip houses in a small town unless you buy them for next to nothing and they're small.

I'd stick with it.  Your investment in that house is super small but the knowledge you will gain will be very large.

It's probably wise to have both stocks and rentals, even if they have different goals like Mike mentioned.  If nothing else, to have a place to store cash while you're looking for properties and to educate yourself on the market.  Like others mentioned above, index funds are the way to go.  What we did on our first house was sell our one stock that was down (harvesting losses) to pay for the down payment of the house.  

If you're going to invest, make sure that you get yourself onto Mint or Personal Capital.  Watching your money on there will make a big difference in how much you save.