All Forum Posts by: Ezinwanne Hawkins

I'm a newbie REI, so while I haven't used it for RE, I have used docusign for my travel business for the last 3 years, and it has made a world of difference. My customers access and sign their contracts in a matter of seconds, all electronically.

The only drawback is that I can't send documents via my smartphone or tablet. Unless there's something I haven't yet figured out. Really annoying to be out running an errand, and you have to go all the way back home or to Kinkos just to be able to send a document.

Besides this, I have been pleased with Docusign.

Are you sure you can't use TurboTax again this year?

I never would have thought to recommend this a year ago, but we hired the CPA from hell to prepare our returns this year. This was our first year filing returns for our travel business, so our returns were definitely more complicated than in previous years. Long story short, the CPA NEVER filed our returns (despite telling us she had), and I decided to use Turbo Tax to get them completed quickly. It was SO easy! They walked me through all of the possible credits deductions we would possibly qualify for, and I actually got us a larger return than the CPA told us we'd get.

I'd give TurboTax a try if I were you - I highly recommend them. Just my $.02.

This is a great question. We've planned for our first 2 props to be cash buys, so I'm anxious to hear some of the responses.

Hello Ned,

Thanks for your advice.

We've spent the last week scouting neighborhoods, and you're right - Baltimore is pretty easy to learn, and we've already learned a ton. We just feel it's always good to have insider knowledge on things like this. My sis has lived there for 8 years, and my BIL is a Baltimore city native, so they've been a great help as well.

We are under no illusion that we are buying in McLean :) we accept Baltimore for what it is and prefer to focus on the good investment the right rental property there could be.

We plan to immerse ourselves in every bit of research and information we can over the next 60 days....all day, everyday :) so we can be 100% ready when our first deal comes along. I know it's fast for some, but we're up for the challenge!

Hello Joel,

Thanks for responding to my post!

We'd like to purchase a multi-family for under 50K. We realize that this puts us on the lower end of the market, and all of the issues that may come with it, but we're committed to this and feel a multi-family is the best way for us to start to build wealth. We'll be paying cash, so we won't have the issues of trying to obtain financing for a non-owner occupied property.

I have a background in social work/affordable housing/fair housing issues, so while both of us work full-time now (I run our travel business and my husband has a W-2 job), eventually, I will likely run our real estate investment business full-time. Within the next 3 years is our goal. However, we will definitely hire a property manager to deal with the day-to-day tenants issues - that's why I got of the non-profit world to begin with! lol

Thanks for your advice :)

Hello everyone. We just made the decision to become real estate investors 2 weeks ago, and have already learned so much from BP in that time frame!

Our plan is to take a small settlement we've just received and purchase a 2-4 unit multi-family rental in the next 60 days in Baltimore. We're trying to learn as much as possible about the sales and rental markets in B-more, being that we're native Washingtonians and don't have much experience with the other end of 295 :)

Any and all advice about which neighborhoods we should be looking in is greatly appreciated. Any leads are even more appreciated :) Thanks everyone!