All Forum Posts by: Alex Paul

@Aaron Xie that would be based on your assumption that Rancho Cucamonga is considered Los Angeles.  In fact, being 40 miles east of Los Angeles proper and in a different county (San Bernardino), Rancho Cucamonga shares almost nothing with LA except being in southern California.  Citizens of both cities value extremely different things.  I personally avoid LA because of the traffic and congestion.  I like Rancho because of the slower pace and family atmosphere common with middle and upper middle class suburbs.

@Account Closed I will never pay full price again :)

@Account Closed The figure I gave is estimated equity after seller's fees/costs, the same units with similar upgrades are currently selling for $10k-20k more than we paid.

@Walter Key. I'm looking at PITI and rent to start. My assumption is if those are negative, adding Property Management, CAPEX, Maintenance, etc will dig an even deeper hole. To address the 2nd part of your statement, we should be able to refi in 3-5 years no problem, we did a conventional 30yr mortgage.

Thanks for this post Micheal, the responses really helped me as well.

Hi all, we (my wife and I) recently purchased our first property in Southern Ca.  It's a 2/2 condo that fit our budget at the time of purchase.  The goal was not to offer this unit for rent for a few years (read 3-5).  We planned to save the down for another house over that time and rent out this property when we moved.  That being said, we didn't save on the purchase, we paid fair market.  If we had to sell now, we would break even, maybe walk away with 3-5k in our pocket.  Things have taken a major swing for the better in our lives and we are now looking to move less than a year after we purchased.  I still want to stick to my original buy and hold strategy and rent out the unit because I expect it to be cash flow positive after 3-4 years.  

Summation of facts:

-Bought condo for residence 7 mos ago

-Will rent apartment in 3-6 mos and put condo for rent

-Condo currently cash flows negative because I paid market value with little $$ down.

-Want to purchase second rental property while living in apartment

Should I aggressively pay down balance on condo to create positive cash flow sooner, then look for other properties?

-or-

Should I look for other properties to get additional units working for me and not worry about this first unit?

My end goal is $15k-$20k monthly net rental income by retirement (15-20yrs)

Hi all, I've developed an interest in real estate as a long term, passive cash flow option for the future.  I have no idea what I'm doing at this stage so pretty much just going to read everything I can get my hands on, listen to podcasts and identify the best course to meet my goals.  You may not see many posts right away but once I'm more familiar with what I want to do and how to go about it, you'll never get me to shut up, haha.