All Forum Posts by: Erica Pelfrey

@Matthew Teitsma congrats! I am about an hour South East of Kzoo but always looking for opportunities in the area. Best wishes for continued success.

@Jessica G. Hi Jessica. LuPei and I are both in their Apartment program. 

@Lu Pei any updates on this?

@John Teachout thank you for responding. We are definitely doing our best to get our personal debt gone and not to come back. Almost all of it is student loans. We are not credit card people and our current debt to income ratio is below 15% so I feel like we do still have margin in our personal lives as well.

I guess I am not aware of helocs being revoked? Is this something that happens often? Going in when we bought our units we felt very good about the price that if needed we could sell them easily. Granted if the market crashed tomorrow that would be trickier.

@Jonathan Greene thank you for your feedback as well and is exactly a repesentation of my fears and why I posted. I do want to be debt free in my personal life and eventually in my business life. Although it is more risky to be using other peoples money to expand my business that also seems to make sense to me. I believe our triplex is not at its peak as I think 2 units are still below market rate on rent but we raised rents when we took it over but we are still low to keep the current tennants who have a proven track of paying and will raise when they turn. We do have reserves although I think we should increase.

Is your philosophy cash sales? Do you have a limit you like to follow on leverage? I am curious to understand all ways of how people do this.

@Ronan Donnelly thank you so much! This is why I love this forum. Your response really helped remind me and put things in perspective! I never would have come up with the analogy of 60 % of my portfolio being out of service due to a fire and how growing is helping me divsrsify!

@Nick Rutkowski thank you Nick. As silly as it sounds I hadn't thought about how long foreclosures could take to close. That would tie up our funds and slow us down. I am definitely hoping this triplex tonight has potential.

@Theresa Harris Thanks for the response Theresa. You are correct that the first two were not foreclosures and I am definitely leaning towards the triplex as well to keep doing what we've been doing. I just wanted some reassurance that we weren't being irresponsible. So many people say "we've barely gotten our feet wet yet" and that scares me that we may be missing something. I appreciate the feedback!

Hi Everyone,

First time poster, few months listener :-)

Looking for feedback on what our next move should be.

My husband and I took out an HELOC last June and jumped into real estate investing. We bought our first duplex using money out of the HELOC and it is cash flowing 200/door. We then were able to buy a triplex in October on land contract but again used the HELOC for the down payment. The triplex is cash flowing almost $700/month in total.

I have gotten really hungry and want to keep forging full speed ahead. We are looking at another triplex tonight.

However we only have enough left in the HELOC to probably do one more down payment on a triplex, so I have also started researching auctions and foreclosures in my area thinking maybe we could get two more quickly that way.

I have never been someone who likes to take on debt. My husband and I have rapidly been working to pay off our personal debt but still have a ways to go, also why we do not have a lot of cash for down payments, as all extra is going on debt. However I have been looking at real estate in a new mind set. We havent technically spent a dime, as all of the expenses are being paid by the renters plus cah flowing well. To me now, its all about scale.

My question to you all is, are we being irresponsible by trying to get too much too fast which will max out our HELOC? Or should we continue, with another multi family or a couple of foreclosures to really try and pay down the HELOC fast? We have been able to build up our nest egg in our real estate business so far which would cover some major maintenance issues if they arise but again it makes me nervous that we may be too close to maxed out. I should also say we have zero intentions of moving out of our current home ever, so the risk on having to pay the HELOC immediately is low.

Thanks for reading and I am very interested in some experienced feedback.