All Forum Posts by: Adam Sankowski

Hey @Yonah Weiss and @Paul Caputo thanks so much for jumping on here.  This is great info!  If you look up bonus deprecation online most of what you find says that it can't be for used property so I'm so glad that I posted this up.  I'll give you a bunch of my situation and see what you have to say and also feel free to PM me or I'm happy to help others with this thread as well.

So this pas year I went on a bit of a buying spree, liquidated some other assets and bought three single family homes in the 50-80K price range.  Two of them are actually in Indianapolis Paul so your back yard.  In the past I know that this has only worked for commercial properties so I don't know if its even worth doing this for these three houses.  Total purchase price of all three together is about 200k.

I want to take as much of a write off this year as my wife and I have a fair amount of W-2 income and I'd love to somehow drop keep that below the 24% bracket instead of the 32% one (I think that's the number) that we are current in.  I also don't know if you can even use real estate loses to deduct from W-2 income? 

Does cost seg'ing these single families even make sense?  Thanks for any info!

Hey, trying to get my head around the new REI tax laws and I've got a bunch of questions. I've looked into hiring a firm to help but they are thousands and thousands and I don't even know what I need until I get some questions answered. Looking for bonus deprecation, cost seg, Airbnb business (I have a unit) answers etc. Anyone have someone they love who's super smart, creative (in a legal way!), and just super up-to-date on tax stuff that I could ask questions of? I know that this will cost $, not worried about that, thanks!!!!! PM me if preferred too.

@Blake Denman thanks for the advice I’ll def check it out!

Hey @Blake Denman good point about the private lending.  So my thing with private lending is just that I don't have control over the properties and what happens to them.  I know that the response to that is that the note is secured by real estate but... I actually just finished Chad Carson's book about retiring early with real estate... and the one story in it where the investors lost everything in 2008 was with note investing, not real estate.  Basically they said that when #$%& hit the fan the house flipper just walked away from everything.  So yes, they got the property but it was half finished or completely gutted, they couldn't find anyone to work on it, and much of what had been done hadn't been permitted so they found the properties that they received as security pretty much useless or requiring so much money to finish that it caused them to go bankrupt.   

So I def. want to use the HELCO to purchase actual properties, not to do any other strategies.  Thanks for the info about the cap on the rate hikes, I'll def. research that! 

Hi everyone, I'm asking for some help with my awesome issue of having a bunch of equity in my house. I live right outside of Boston in Somerville which is absolutely exploding right now in house prices. I know everyone talks about how their market is crazy hot but for example a 2 family house, that's behind another house on the same lot (aka. no yard of any kind) just went on the market on my street for 1.7 million. Our 2 family is way bigger and nicer than it and we bought it for 740K 5 years ago.

Anyways, we just closed on a HELCO and I have a bunch of equity to play with, several hundred thousand. My main goal is achieving financial freedom as quick as possible. Our family probably needs about $6,000 a month to live off of if that matters. Part of these funds has already been ear marked for renovating our house to create an Airbnb unit, which will help the financial freedom goal, but that's not the focus of this question...

My question is: is using the rest of the HELCO money as down payments on cash flowing rentals a good strategy? I already own two single fams in Indy and one in KC so I already have out of town real estate teams and contractors in place. My concern is over-leveraging... can banks call a HELCO if another 2008 happens and the price of our home decreases... like they can with capital calls on commercial real estate? Can the rates increase at a dangerous rate since they aren't fixed? Or as long as the properties I buy are cash flowing am I good to go if I'm also using part of the cash flow to pay down the HELCO?

I haven't heard anyone anywhere really lay out a solid step-by-step strategy for using a HELCO in this manner. I hear people all the time say that you should be using all of the equity in your properties ... but how??? And what is the safest way to do that? I don't want to sell because this is only going up in value since a subway line is due to be built in my neighborhood in the next two years. Plus I love where I live and I don't want to deal with a 1031 exchange or anything like that. But, I'm done with working and want to put this equity to work for me. Also, I'm not interested in note investing or private lending or anything like that.

My initial thought was to go and buy a piece of commercial real estate, like an 8-12 unit building somewhere like Indy/ KC/ or Cleveland. Commercial financing scares me but if I used the HELCO funds I could basically pay cash for it and then just pay off the HELCO instead of dealing with a commercial loan that will be due in 5 years. Is this a good idea?

Also, in 10 years I need to either pay off or re-finance my HELCO... has anyone ever run into an issue where they couldn't refinance? Like in 2008? Wow I know this is a lot. Even just directing me to a book or article about this would be awesome. Just wanted to make sure that I'm not missing something or not thinking about something important. Thanks for your time!