All Forum Posts by: Max Drizin

I've always heard, "Happy wife, happy life!"

Hope that happiness is worth the 50k, that's a down payment or two depending on what you are looking for :wink:

Lance,

Depending on your connections or a good agent, you can find turnkey properties at good prices. A lot of investors screwed up in the past couple of years and need quick cash to get out without foreclosing or short selling. If there is any time that you can get a good deal, it is right now.

I don't know where you are in south Chicago, but if you are in the 57th street area, Hyde Park, there might be deals. Last time I was in that area, I remember a good amount of for sale signs, and you are also in the UChicago area, so there is a strong rental market.

I think a 2-4 owner-occupied is a great idea, and if you are willing to do some work on it, that's even better. If you find a turnkey property, there isn't a reason not to go with it. But, if you can't find one, doing some work isn't necessarily a bad thing.

If you've got the determination, and it appears you do, then you'll do well for yourself. Good luck!

Figuring 30% vacancy seems high to me. In my markets, I always figure 3%, but I know that's completely maintainable here. In fact, I'm currently at 0% vacancy for all of the units.

However, I'd figure at something lower. Find out what the market vacancy is for the area, or a comparably-sized city. From there, you might add on some for your issues with the property. With good management, though, it isn't hard to lease an apartment. Good Craigslist ads with pictures and maybe signs if you have to.

All utilities paid isn't the best way to get people, since they always look at the rent. There's a thread somewhere for utilities-paid apartments, and general consensus is that lower rents is better than utilities-paid apartments.

There's always also discounting the apartments and taking below-market rents just to get the places rented out. In all honesty, taking $50/month less than market is worth it, if you don't think you can rent out the apartments.

This deal seems like it comes down to the area and the vacancy. You've got a couple grand worth of work to go into two of those apartments, but you just need to finish those up, and it shouldn't take long for that. If you have it under contract right now, you need to make your decisions soon. I don't know what you have down in earnest money right now, but if you have a good amount down, you need to make the decision soon.

I'll bite on that! It's not the best fit for our investment website, but when the blogs roll out on the brokerage site (tentative to within a month), I'd be happy to show my support for the site, Pro membership or not. I'll be sure to shoot you an email when we get it online.

It's quite too good to be true. It says that there is some sort of "catalyst" for the combustion. Unfortunately, combustion isn't something that's really catalyzed.

If you want to talk catalyzation, it's basically one chemical that acts as an intermediary of a reaction, so instead of going from A to C directly, which could be very slow (usually is, our body catalyzes a number if important functions, as does your car's catalytic converter for emissions), it goes from A to B very quickly, and then B to C very quickly.

There's not really a way to catalyze a combustion reaction, since a combustion reaction using octane isn't that complex and it's already in its fastest form. In fact, it seems as though EnviroTabs do the opposite of what's best, they lower the octane levels, or tell people to use lower octane. Less octane means less combustion in the chamber, weaker combustion overall, and less power from each cylinder.

The most troubling part is how it talks about lowering the heat required for an engine, and saying it works with diesel. Diesel uses no heat, it is purely compression-based. This is why diesel trucks have engine-warmers in the winter, there is some heat required for the combustion to take place. Even if this chemical/tab/whatever actually does reduce the heat required for a combustion, there is no benefit to that for a diesel engine.

In unleaded gasoline engines, combustion is spark-triggered, by your spark/pulse plugs. The heat doesn't play a role in this, which is why you don't need to idle your unleaded gasoline engines in cold weather, and they don't need engine warmers (unless your gas freezes, which is a whole different ballpark). Retaining heat within the cylinders doesn't matter, since the mixture of compression and spark is what drives the combustion.

Yes, you could say that the increased heat in the engine allows for a slightly faster combustion process, but there are better alternatives.

If you'd like, there are things like pulse spark plugs, which deliver much stronger sparks to more efficiently ignite the gasoline in your non-diesel engine, and there are some differences in the quality.

Or, you can tune your gear ratios to better levels, you could change fuel-air mixtures, change the filters, and so on. All of these things do help, but there is no magic way to increase fuel efficiency. Also, using the octane rating it says in your manual is important. Some cars take 89, 90, or 92 octane. The lowest sold isn't always the best value, for your engine or your mileage. They call the high-end stuff Premium or Ultra for a reason.

Its actually the same with me. I haven't tested in IE9 since I can't ever remember my password (thank God for saved ones). Here's the screenshot. I'd also like to note how great it is to have an administrator so involved in the community.

Too often, I see admins of major communities either end up only doing the administration and losing sight of what everything is about, or spending all of their time policing members and whatnot, it's great to have someone who also just spends his time as part of the community, in the discussions, and everything else.

That's an awesome difference! I actually worked with some people on one of the world's largest forums (currently indexing about 198,000,000 posts, active and archived combined) on a complete rewrite of the search technology.

Along with several thousand in new search servers, the new system basically cut our response time in searches from anywhere up to 10 seconds down to less than half a second.

I've also noticed that when opening up the category views, there's no noticeable choppiness/lag that there used to be when having multiple categories dropped down. What is being used to do the category listing now, if I may pry? I've only messed around with things like mootools myself.

My baby is a 1979 Mercedes 450SL. Bought it from a lady after her father had passed, he was the first and only owner of the car. Apparently only drove it on weekends when it rained, so he never had to wash it.

It had sat without being touched for about six years, so it wouldn't start. She was convinced it was completely dead and worth nothing, even though it only had 65,000 miles on it! I bought it from her for $2,000, put another $3,000 worth of a battery, spark plugs, and some miscellaneous cleaning and tuning into it. Drives great, the thing is a boat.

It only gets eight miles per gallon, so I keep from driving it whenever possible, but there's some days (like today) that it's just perfect to put the top down and go for a cruise.

The thing is a tank. It has no airbags, and only meets requirements to be usable in a few states because of different emissions or safety laws, but its safe. If I get in a crash, I'm going straight through the other car.

I feel that there was a time in the mid-seventies where the Germans asked how they could make their cars better. The answer apparently was to make it heavier and more powerful.

Oh, and it's royal blue.

On the contrary of smit, I was just (unfortunately) involved with a guy who was able to get a loan modification several investment properties with his bank.

He has several cash-flowing properties, but also a few crap properties which were draining all of his available funds that he needed to finish the properties. I was planning on buying his cash-flowing properties and he would invest that money into the underwater properties.

Unfortunately for me, he was able to go to the bank with a few different options. He was looking at short selling them, but he was able to get a loan modification and bring down his monthly payments so that he could finish the projects.

Now, it's probably not common for that to happen, but it sort of worked in his favor that the properties would be salable when he finished the work, and he just needed a year or so of lower payments to secure the finances.

Banks doing short sales is definitely more common. They are trying to do everything in their power to keep foreclosures down, and I'm surprised that I haven't seen more loan modifications, but I would assume it is more common with smaller investors, people who have one or two properties.