All Forum Posts by: Heidi Johnson

My wife and I are HI W2 and business owners. We have a primary home, short-term rentals as well as paper investments. Early last year we started looking for our first tax planning partner.
In March 2023 we started conversations with True Books. In April we closed the tax planning combo with them. There was an onboarding phase, which was mostly about uploading our financial docs and answering questions. About a month later we had our meeting with our sponsor CPA. From the start we could tell she hadn't read any of the questions we carefully answered nor reviewed any of the sensitive documents we uploaded during onboarding. The CPA was clearly knowledgeable and answered all our questions. She also provided further information - after the meeting, via email - about aspects of points we discussed. All of them boilerplate emails.
The meeting was mostly passive. It was probably the most expensive Q&A we have ever paid for. After the meeting there was no action plan other than doing a cost segregation study on the properties we had. That was it! Any YT vid gives you that. There was no tailored strategy on the best way to save taxes by investing in real estate or otherwise. There was no scheduling for further calls. All and any of our questions moving forward were addressed via email. Sometimes with a significant delay.
In July we were prompted to answer a feedback survey. We were thoughtful about every word we wanted to send, so that we wouldn't be unfair to what they had promised to offer. We review the text 4 times before shipping. Weeks later we received an answer from their CEO. The email was short and challenged us by implying we were looking for investing planning and not tax planning. We felt gaslighted. And $5,000 poorer.
Over the course of our relationship, we barely used 10 hours of their time, including the onboarding, the meetings and email communication. My wife thinks we used not even 5. But who's counting?
I wanted to drop this review so that future clients are aware of what they are getting into. Make sure you are going to get your money's worth.
One more thing: Matt claims they have now fixed their staffing issue and fine tuned the business. Good for them! We are not coming back. Neither is our investment. We can only hope future clients get their expected return. Good luck!

Hey @Steven Silbert! Great to see you on here. And big love to @Jawei Kuo who is a rockstar and colleague of mine in the area.

While the moratorium in Los Osos has been lifted, there is a LONG LINE of over 200 vacant lots that will have first right to build. The goal is 40-50 lots being issued permits PER YEAR over the next 4-5 years. I'm a homeowner in Osos and can tell you - it's been quite the contentious issue over here! 

That said, you could attempt to purchase one of the lots that is for sale and in doing so, you would assume their position on the waitlist. The position stays with the lot even if the owner changes. 

As far as house-hacking, the way I have seen this work (I have helped multiple clients with this strategy) is purchasing a duplex or a property that has an existing layout that could be CONVERTED into a primary and JADU. 

Ground up build for an ADU is indeed cost prohibitive, but possible.

Excited for your big move and to eventually call you a neighbor!!

Looking to buy an existing STR in Northern CA. We have a few properties outside the state but we live here and for various reasons, want one nearby that we can manage and run ourselves. Curious if there are agents that specialize in this or services here. A couple of my regular residential local agent friends in the SF Bay Area shared they didn't know much about where to find these. Google is useless and I've never had this challenge in our out of state property purchases. Want to buy within the next 2 months. Thanks in advance for your suggestions!

Quickbooks is straight forward and does not require an 85 Doller version. One of the tings you need to learn is that if you dont want to be a "finance person" then property management or real estate in general is not the career for you, because it it all boils down to numbers and if you think you can wing it without understanding finances then you wont make it in real estate.

Hello! I just bought my first property.... a garage apartment under our LLC. While I only have one property, I'd still like to find some type of Accounting software to keep track of expenses as I'm going to be putting some money into this play. At the same time, I don't want to overcomplicate and am looking for something minimal to get me started. Any suggestions? Are there any free options out there? If not, anything reasonably priced?

Thanks!

Maybe you having 10 doors is already enough for "big boy software" you mentioned. Quickbooks is probably the most tried-and-true solution.

I unfortunately also had problems with Stessa. I have enough transactions on Stessa now that they start to produce inconsistent reports (they would randomly lose one transaction and the transaction will appear the next time I query again). I ended up having to manually reconcile some of the Stessa reports, which defeated the purpose of using an online platform. I haven't tried other solutions mentioned in this post yet, but have found quickbooks to be fine. Manual spreadsheet is also okay especially if have bookkeeping help from platforms like upwork.