All Forum Posts by: Jason Leavitt

 “Luck happens when preparation meets opportunity.“ -Seneca 

My guess is your credit score will come right back. The card you transferred the balance to probably reported to the credit agency before the card you paid off. It’s just a timing issue. 

Is the 25k equity you mentioned before hitting 80% LTV? If so, it might be worth it, otherwise probably not.

 There may be something about your specific situation that your lender is deeming a higher risk. But yes, that is high.  Looking at what’s available on bankrate.com a 30 year conventional loan should be as low as about 3.5% (with minimal points) right now (3.625 without a buy down) and the rental property loan should be under 4% still. 

Yes, you can absolutely get a HELOC on an investment property. The credit union I work for does them up to 80% LTV, message me if you want more specifics.

Call the police when something like that happens. At the very least there will be a report, which may be helpful in the eviction proceedings (though I have yet to go through an evection so cannot speak from experience).  Also, should something bad happen to one of your other tenants because of them I would think you’d be less likely to be held liable for not taking action when you knew about the issues.  Good luck and I hope you can get them out of there soon. 

3-4K isn’t surprising given the cost of the home and that its two units. What is the age of the building?  If you’re not knowledgeable about these things you could have a home inspection done and ask them to point out any obvious signs of upcoming large capital expenditures (new roof, furnace etc.).  At least that way you may be able to anticipate some of the costs over the next couple years and use that help inform your decision. 

Well, where there's a will there's a way. But I think you'd have to get pretty creative to be successful with your current resources and DTI. I would tend to agree with @Caleb Heimsoth  that you may not be in the right financial situation currently to invest in real estate. I would focus on paying down the student loans. If you had a rate of say 6.5% that will be a guaranteed return of that same amount by paying them down. Could you do better in real estate? Maybe, but there is a risk versus reward trade off and you’d be taking on the unknown risk when the alternative is a guaranteed reward.  Best of luck whatever you decide to do.

80% of 130 is 104 so that’s only short of getting your entire purchase plus rehab investment back by 1k.  Where is the 10K down and 30K for rehab coming from? You can take a little more time on the rehab at 0% interest (though you’ll have no revenue to offset the principal payments until it’s rented so that’s some carrying costs). If the numbers look good after a refi then it’s still a good deal and you would have at least gotten a good start with the 0% interest even if it is only a short time.  If you don’t need the 40K back then you could still benefit from the 0% interest on the remaining 65k as long as you want to… 

Aloha,

 What market are you looking to invest in? Assume it’s not Hawaii with this strategy as I don’t think you’ll find PLOCs with very high limits or low enough interest rates to make this a feasible source of financing.  It’s easy to check rate sheets on various bank and credit union websites though to see if anything meets your needs. 

It would not really affect your DTI though because you would be financing out of the PLOC in the refi stage (if all goes according to plan) so that loan would no longer be a part of the calculation.

Good advice above from @Habbak Burs.  You are building wealth through the pay down of your mortgage and likely appreciation depending on your market. If you’re comfortable with your monthly cash flow then just keep doing what you’re doing, or refinance as suggested while rates are still low and you can gain more monthly cash flow. Either way you’re growing your network in the long run which will give you great options in the future. The thing about the slow burn strategy is you can just leave it on auto pilot and then one day you’ll find you have lots of options with the equity you have built up.