All Forum Posts by: Edith TenBroek

Good thoughts! Our furnace is high efficiency, but almost 20 years old, so it's soon time to replace it anyway and we should probably do two furnaces at that time. Any rough ideas on the cost for this in Central IL? Our house is a large Victorian two story, about 3500 sq. feet, with MOSTLY replaced windows. Our gas bill runs around 90 a month with a level plan.

What about equity loans in the case of an emergency? Also, if DH got sick or something, we could use the cash flow at that time and stop the extra principle payments. What would you do with the extra money if you weren't putting it on the mortgage and didn't need it to live on?

BTW, we are currently doing Dave Ramsey, and we will have a 3-6 month emergency fund in place before jumping into Real Estate investing.

I'm a complete newbie here, just trying to learn a bit about the trade before we jump in, so please be gentle! LOL!

So DH and I are looking at some long term investments. We hope to start buying property in five years or so. We will be 50. First we need to pay off some debts and save some money. DH has a full time job he loves, and I'm a homeschooling work from home mom. In five years I will only have one homeschooler and my time will be freer for property management tasks.

We would ideally like to have rentals to help us with income during retirement. Would the best plan be to take all of the rental payment and put it towards mortgage (after saving a set amount for repair emergencies and or vacancies of course) so we can pay them off more quickly and have retirement monies at 65? DH's income is plenty for now, and he has a pension, but I want to work on ways to increase our retirement income and this seems smart!

Anything I'm not thinking of here?

Hello!

DH and I are looking at some long term goals. We hope to accelerate our mortgage payments, pay off this house and build a nest egg over the next 10 years. Then we want to move further into the country to a house with some land.

Our current house is in a small town. There is definite need for rental housing in the small town. When we bought the house it was flatted out into an upstairs and downstairs apartment. The previous owners lived downstairs and rented the upstairs. We are thinking of renting both the upstairs and downstairs when we move out. There are separate electric meters, but only one gas meter. The furnace is gas, and the thermostat control is on the lower floor. How would we handle two tennants with one in control of the thermostat?

This is the only thing that is stumping me with this endeavor.

Alternatively, we could just sell this house, and buy something else and rent that out. But if I can overcome this issue, renting out this house seems simpler.

Thoughts?