All Forum Posts by: Graham K.

I had plenty of luck finding 80% LTV cash out loans before the crisis. But cash out could not exceed $500k which was a bummer for me.

Thanks everyone. I was able to get an 80% LTV cash out for 3.25% with loandepot.com! That's after buying max points of course. I just needed to call around more.

Two and a half years ago my wife and I bought a fixer SFR for $450k in a neighborhood where houses rarely sell for less than a million. The rehab cost more than expected (surprise surprise) at about $650k. So we're in it for at least $1.1M but the good news is that by conservative estimates, it's now worth at least $1.2M so I think we came out okay. The problem now is that we spent nearly all our cash and we want to keep this house as a rental and buy another primary residence or maybe build an ADU or even do both.

What I'd like to do now is an 80% LTV cash out refinance. That'd be a loan amount of $960k. Our current mortgage balance is $343k so we'd cash out $617k. However, every lender I've applied with so far won't do a loan amount over $780k (which I thought was odd as I would have expected any such cap to be $765k, the conforming loan limit in this area).

Do you have experience doing a jumbo cash out refi? 

Side notes:

• Our application is solid. We have no other debt, our credit scores are over 780, and we have the income and assets to qualify. And the house will appraise, I am confident of that.

• I don't want to do a smaller loan amount on the cash out refi and then take a HELOC for the rest. I am very interested rate and interest expense sensitive. I wouldn't hesitate to spend $28k on points to get the lowest rate.

• We plan to stick pretty much all of the cash out into high interest savings accounts until we decide our next move. Why cash out now and start paying interest on money we’re not going to use right away? Because I want to keep all of our investment options on the table and not worry about a change in the housing market or lending environment.   

• We plan to keep the house for at least 30 years. It’s a retirement play.

• Rental income will start off around $6000-7000 so I expect to be break even in the long run and I’m fine with that.

• We moved back into the house. We think we’ll live here 1-5 years before buying our forever home.

I’m open to alternative scenarios I haven’t thought of.

I hired a general contractor to do a foundation replacement and several other smaller jobs on my house. The total contract is for $210k. The foundation portion is $163k. The remaining $47k is a bunch of other stuff like new HVAC, sewer lateral, electrical, chimney removal, siding, water heater, relocate gas meter, etc. We signed the contract at the end of May and it specified that all of the work was to be completed by the end of August. The contract we used is AIA Document A105 - 2017.

It’s now the middle of November. The contractor started with the foundation and it’s about 90% done. He has done numerous things incorrectly and the workmanship is awful. I have caught many mistakes, and to be fair, he has fixed them when possible. Everything is sloppy: the concrete pours, the way things are aligned, the way things are nailed. I could write a book about all that has gone wrong and all that has been poorly done. The contractor is usually on site for an hour in the morning and then his guys work the rest of the day. They are unskilled at best. I catch them doing things wrong all the time.

Because of the way things are going, I want to let the contractor go after the foundation is finished so I can work with other contractors to do the remaining work. Of course, I am current with all progress payments and I certainly intend to pay the contractor for all the work he has done.

But how can/should I go about getting out of the rest of the contract? I need a strategy for telling him without infuriating him. Even though it’s been a very unpleasant experience, I still want to avoid burning bridges. I also need to go about it in a legally acceptable way so that I am minimizing my risk of lawsuits and liens. Any advice would be much appreciated.

@Derek Antonissen It was a list of around 1400 mailed 5 times. A different mail piece each time.

Took me 7000 pieces of mail to get my first deal. Put it under contract for $178k. Found a buyer and assigned it at $198k. Everything closed as expected and I got a check for $20k. My buyer flipped it and sold it for $279k a few months later. It was a win-win-win! I just wish I had the cash to close and fix myself. That would have been a win-WIN. Next time!

Huge thank you to everyone at BiggerPockets for teaching me how to do that!

@David Briley would you mind sharing your high converting postcards with me?

I should have deals coming through this year. PM your email and phone number to be notified.

If you don't have to borrow the funds, it could be a baby deal if you truly don't need  to do any work to get $137k for it.

I have had leads slip through my fingers because I don't speak Spanish. Now I put Hablo Español on my pieces and I will get a translator quickly if I need to.