All Forum Posts by: Brent Hindman

Very true and we were kind of thinking about that 3 year time span as well. Probably not much better time to try out the rental game and if it doesn’t work well, or we don’t like it we can still sell and keep the capital gains exemption. Thanks for that!

Thanks for your insight Elise! That’s good to hear about mid to higher end rentals as that was partly a concern of mine. I am familiar with rentometer and that is where I got my approximate rent numbers from. I am trying to be as realistic and conservative as possible 

Current rates make the next home tough even at our income with two kids etc. We aren’t aiming for anything top of the line or updated but we need bigger and more bedrooms etc. so our next home we are looking $450kish and not much more. Monthly payments at that still add a squeeze in trying not to become “house poor” so I’d rather have a little more leverage up front and just be able to pay it down quickly 

Yes Nathan thank you I do agree with you and have that same mindset as well. We do currently have around $50k set aside for our next downpayment as well (that's in addition to a $25k emergency fund). We are currently continuing to save towards that monthly and my thoughts are we would only use the HELOC in the smallest amount necessary depending on how much we need to fill the gap of the next down payment. So more time goes on and more cash we have, the less HELOC we use. The most I would see is using is $50k and we would convert that to HELOAN after closing on the next house and aim to pay that off in a year or so (ASAP). We have two kids in daycare etc so our savings rate is still good, but we both work from home and the nursery is a shared office as we outgrew this current house faster than expected so we are trying to move by the end of 2025 at the latest. Could be sooner permitting what comes on the market that would best suit us therefore this is where the HELOC would mainly help.

Thanks for your insight Jeremy! That makes sense to me and I greatly appreciate you taking the time to answer!

Our plan is to upgrade and buy a more forever home type scenario. Keep this current home as our first rental, maybe slowly accumulate some others after being in our next home and having the first one run smoothly for a year or two I would say

Yes that includes our taxes and everything. 30 year mortgage. Allegheny county is certainly a higher tax county than most of the others in the state. Just behind Philly I think 

Thanks for your response Jaycee! I’ve been documenting multiple comps close to my house tracking rents and it seems like my house would rent around $2,000/month. Our current mortgage is $1550/mo so saving somewhere between 10-15% would put us 380-400/mo CF after. Does that sound correct? Our current home value is ~$310k and we owe ~$198k. 

Hi everyone,

My wife and I are both 32 with 2 kids, 3 & 1. We make about $250k per year(before taxes) and have outgrown our first home we bought at beginning of 2020. It's a 3/2 at about 1560 sqft in the north hills of Pittsburgh. We bought it for $225k with a 3.125% mortgage and 1) are interested in keeping it as our first rental. 2) We are thinking about using some of the equity (maybe $50k or less as a HELOC to combine with existing cash for our next home down payment that we can convert to a HELOAN through our credit union). We would plan on paying that back off pretty quickly in about 1-2years. Thoughts on this? I estimate we should be able to cash flow ~$400 per month after 10% for Cap Ex, vacancies etc set aside.