All Forum Posts by: Bryce Peterson

Glad you set this up. I wanted to go to the white plains meet up but had some bday plans for my girlfriend. I’ll be there! Lookin forward to meeting you both. 

Updated location for the REI meetup 8/12/17.

It will now be in Honolulu.

Those who have expressed interest will be receiving an email from me shortly to request confirmation so we have a head count.

Please feel free to write here, PM, or email me at [email protected]

@Lane Kawaoka We may be able to change locations or could do one in Honolulu as well. Are you currently on island? I see you work near my home town in WA. Lets connect for sure.

Aloha from Hawaii !

I'm looking to rally Bigger Pockets members for an Oahu REI Meetup. I figured I'd reach out and see how many are interested.

Currently, I have 5 people who will be joining me Saturday August 12, 2017 (mid morning) at my house for an REI meetup + a bonus market update from my realtor who I trust. He helped me with my first home purchase and I absolutely value his knowledge.

It will most definitely roll right into a BBQ afterwards where we can continue to mingle. If the group size gets too big for my place, then I'll figure out a new location that can accommodate.

I am located in the Kapolei / Makakilo area.

Looking forward to hearing back!

Bryce

@Isi Nau I would also like his info please. Thanks!!

@Account Closed could shed some light on that.

Perhaps you and your husband live there with her for whatever amount of time it takes to refi to conventional. 

@Jason Meyers. There are some opposing opinions for sure. But my initial conclusion would side with the people that say your HELOC money would be better served as a down payment on another cash flowing rental property. I'd be willing to bet that if your HELOC was used to buy a foreclosure property with a lot of value add opportunities in it, that your return would be a lot better and quicker than using it to pay down a mortgage. If you used the HELOC for a new purchase, you could just take your cash flow from the new property, pay your HELOC payment with it each month, then anything left over you could use to pay extra principal on the mortgage you wanted to cut time off of.

A friend told me they were looking into this and getting excited about it so I gave them this response. I know this thread is an older one. What did you decide to do?

Thanks for clarifying @Kayla W.  Not to derail the discussion, but do you think that this could be an improvement ? It definitely would be nice to be able to select any linked bank account a payment goes to when setting up the charge.

Thanks All ! 

This is excellent info.

@AdaPia DErrico, appreciate those references. I'll check them out.

I have a 4 bedroom SFH.

Renting to fairly young working professionals who are not related to each other.

I do it different than most people here. I have all of the utilities come directly out of one of my account automatically, then have the tenants repay me directly through cozy vs. having the utilities in their name. They pay their rent through Cozy as well.

It's pretty easy to look at my "utilities" checking account, add them up, divide by the number of tenants, and add a charge to each of their accounts once a month. Or in your case if you have one lease for the SFH, just add them up and charge them the whole amount.

It keeps my mind at peace knowing that none of the utilities will go unpaid, and keeps any one person under lease from having to manage the money gathering. I feel like it's a good way to handle it with the way I am running things. People like things being easy and automated.

If I were to charge a flat rate for each tenant monthly on top of their rent, then I'd be giving them the green light to run air conditioning constantly and take 2 hour showers every day. But since they pay for what they use, that is not a problem. When there is a spike in their utilities, they don't call me, they talk with each other to handle it.

If you decide to do it this way, you'd just need to make sure to have enough of a $ buffer in the utilities account to make sure that if anybody doesn't pay it back, your account doesn't get low or overdraft. On Cozy you can specify what bank account you want what type of payment to go to. So, it'd be easy to have a rent account and a utilities account.

Then again. If you wanted to pay the utilities yourself and make an extra buck, you could always build a conservative flat rate utilities figure into their rent, then write into the lease that if the utilities total for a given month exceeds their flat rate utility payment, they pay the difference. In that case, you cant really lose unless they don't pay. If they use less than what they pay, you take a little gain, and if they use more, they pay.

Anyways, that's my 2 cents.

I assume once I have a lot more rental properties I might handle it differently so there is less involvement. But for now it's an easy option.