All Forum Posts by: Brett Russell

@Sebastian Boruta , welcome to BP.  I grew up in the (not quite as far) northern suburbs and spent many a summer day in Gurnee at Great America.

I like your plans and you will definitely find a ton of knowledge here to support your endeavors.

@Mark Nugent , I would definitely agree with the idea of only contributing up the match.  That assumes you are able to invest the money in good deals.  Even if you don't use leverage, you still would likely have similar or better return on that money than in a 401k and once you use leverage, your cash on cash return will go up and you'll get magnified returns with any appreciation as @Account Closed mentioned.

But really don't forget about the huge tax advantages you can get from holding rental property.  You likely won't have to pay much, if any, tax on all the income from your rental property and might even have enough paper losses to offset some of your active income (if you income is below the cutoff).

@Account Closed , the situation you describe is the definition of a short sale and, unfortunately for many homeowners, not unique at all.  

Either the bank will have to agree to a short sale (ie seller gets to pay off the mortgage with whatever proceeds there are from the sale) or the seller could bring money to the table from some other means to make up the difference.

 You are welcome... I just spent about 10 minutes confirming I'm seeing the same behavior with Firefox and Safari as well.  (That's why your servers just saw 3 dozen login attempts from me!)

 Alright, you type faster than me!

But, @Joshua Dorkin, I am actually still seeing a bug.  I can login fine whether I'm using email or username if I click the login selection from the dropdown icon in the upper right of the screen.  However, for some reason, if I go to the login page (https://beta.biggerpockets.com/account/login) and login, the first time I try, whether I use email or password, it fails.  The second time works fine.  I tried this repeatedly on Chrome, and definitely checked spelling, and even had 1Password do the fills and I get the same issue repeatedly.

@Timothy Nelson , they key, as @Brie Schmidt  mentioned above, is that your financing should allow you to actually earn more than you were previously.  So, if your 2 properties each earn you $500/month then refinancing will definitely lower their cash flow, maybe to $300/each let's say.  But, if it allows you to acquire another property that earns you $500/month again, then you are now making $1100/month total instead of the $1000/month you were originally making.  

Plus, as mentioned by @George P. , you have diversified over 3 properties rather than just 2.

@Joshua Dorkin , minor issue but the login screen now asks for "email address" rather than "username" so I thought maybe you had changed your processes, but it will NOT let me login with my email address, I still must use my username.  So, just a change to the verbage on that login screen would help minimize confusion

@Adrian Rice , while you may not have missed the REO wave, if you are looking to wholesale, I would recommend you look to a different strategy for finding deals. If a property is listed (REO or not), chances are your end buyer has already seen it so you would have to have some sort of remarkable negotiation skills to be able to get it under contract at a price that you could make your fee and the end buyer would getting a deal they would be happy with.

@Michael Dunn , the 50% rule is supposed to be an approximate average over time over a portfolio of properties.

So, you should be putting money into a reserve fund every month for the next time a big expense comes up. If you are only thinking of holding the rental for a few years and then selling, you might get away with it, but if you plan to hold long term, not accounting for future large expenses could be disastrous and the 50% rule should put you in the ballpark.

@Account Closed , don't negotiate for the seller.

"Health reasons" might mean they can't deal with the day to day management, but would love to still have some cash flow from the property. So, I'd definitely consider offering terms that would work for you and see what response you get.