Great info, but the numbers are a bit high. Any land that is worth $50k an acre is way to valuable to donate. In my area you can buy buildable land for 20k/acre, so stuff that goes into a conservancy easement is probably more like $3k per acre.
It depends on the structure but I agree with you. Most of the time you're talking about land that doesn't have all that much value and any appraiser that's not crooked is going to recognize the land for what it is - you can't comp 15 acres of swamp or rocky cliffs with 15 acres of flat farmland and get away with that honestly, unless the entire point is to defraud the IRS.
I worked with my District on a massive conservation easement about 20 years ago. We donated an easement only (not the land itself) on 1900 acres to prohibit logging or development for $4.5 million, which works out to about $2500 per acre.
I saw this article on the WSJ this morning. My comment there was the same as it is here - the problem all these people have is not working a regular job.
These stories almost always boil down to one indisputable fact - the people in them never work regular jobs. They're always trying to get by on some patchwork quilt of pseudo-work instead of getting out there and getting a real job, something that is plentiful right now virtually everywhere. If these two women were each working 15/hr, even 30 hr week jobs, they would be bringing in $900 gross each week. For low income people that's about $800/wk, or $3200 on 4 week months and $4k every third month. The rent was $1450, so yes that's relatively expensive compared to that income but that's assuming a part time job for both of them. Too many people trying to get by on some combination of fake jobs, government subsidies and charity. 99% of all the problems these people face, including the homeless, would go away if they got off their duff and started working a real job. There's no shame in working at fast food or anywhere else to have a stable life - you do what you have to do.
Find another insurer. They may be getting out of your market, or the commercial rental market, or duplexes, or just don't like your track record. You're not going to convince an insurance carrier to change their mind; that's going to be a waste of time. If they aren't renewing, it is a business decision and I can't imagine what you might say to have them reconsider.
Without knowing the appreciation in the area you bought, that part is hard to answer, but just given your numbers I would definitely sell. Your down payment was under $20k. You're losing that much every 16 months at this point. You are making enough income to bring a check with you if you can't sell for what you owe + any fees. Sometimes you do lose money in RE and this looks like it is one of those times.
Is it possible to move into the home? Then your "loss" is only $700 more per month than what it is now, and if you live there at least 2 years and can manage to sell for a profit you won't owe any capital gains assuming you lived there first. Why did you move from the house into an apartment?
This sounds like maybe an OK house for you to live in and a terrible rental.
After reading Dan Sheek's book, First to a Million, I've learned so much about personal finance and I'm thinking about my future life decisions (I'm 15 as of this post). But my parents are disputing the options that I've been thinking about. For more info, my family is in the middle class and are working through the typical American Dream. They don't have any experience investing. Disclaimer: I am in no way trying to talk bad about them or insinuate they're bad parents. I do love them, they've given me a life that not a lot of others have, and I'm truly grateful for them. But they don't seem to trust me or the ideas in Mr. Sheek's book. I've decided to not attend college, so I can achieve financial independence faster and to avoid student debt. But my mom won't let me not enroll. My dad is a bit more lenient about this. The only problem is that he wants me to save up and learn the value of earning money. These are good expectations, as the book wants me to get an income/earn more, which is step one. I'm okay with that, but he distrusts me so much on being able to not spend as much, which is step 2. Step 3, I have to save the difference between what I spend and what I earn. No problems there, but the last step is where things fall apart. Step 4, invest wisely. The book gives an overview on index funds and real estate. I have read many books over real estate the past few months, and it DOES seem like a great long-term investment for early financial freedom. But my dad, doesn't want me to own any, and suggests that I work at a franchise and just move up the coorporate ladder from there to get a feel of business and then he'll entrust me with his money to start opening more franchises.
That is the exact thing I'm trying to avoid.
I don't want to be dependent on making money via active income for that long of a time, I want PASSIVE income. But my dad says real estate is too risky and if I can't meet his expectations on being frugal or working the job, he'll send me to college! I have zero voice in this and I'm too afraid to even talk back. I don't know how I'll change their mind or get them to understand me. Can parents legally force me to attend a university? I want to be happy and free in my late twenties, like the book suggests, not worrying about operating these franchises. Maybe franchise owning/small commercial real estate is a good idea? But I'm not going to rise through the ranks, I'm soley working there part-time or full-time to make my first income, this isn't my sole path. And this really bothers me because I thought I could be the one to make my family wealthy, but my parents can't seem to see eye-to-eye with me and they'll distrust me even further.
In short, I just need help. I need a mentor to guide me on personal finance and investing, I want freedom and control over my life, I want the very people who raised me to just believe in me this once. I don't know everything and now I'm even more unsure.
Do my parents really know best? Was all my time reading about real estate worthless? How many information has been sugercoated or false? Can I even be financially independent in this situation?
Thank you for reading this, I've always known I'd be at my most uncomfortable when approaching adulthood and what's worse is I have no one on my side. Please answer any of these questions or suggest any advice on how I should handle this mess. If you're in Frisco or any nearby Texas city, and are willing to accept an intern to mentor who'd be willing to show me the ropes, please do...
At this point finding a mentor in the summer (anytime without school) would be my best card at the moment. I may be inexperienced, and thats why I need a mentor to be hard on me. I don't want to lose trust or fail to help my future mentor. I don't want all this knowledge to not be put to use when it was meant for me to pursue it sooner. I want everything I did to be worth it (reading about real estate, joining BiggerPockets, networking, etc.)
Thoughts:
1. No, if you are 18 your parents cannot force you to attend a university.
2. If you're already worrying about retiring before you've ever joined the workforce, you need to expand your horizons and consider work that is both meaningful and financially rewarding. What exactly do you think you'll be doing if, by some miracle, you managed to achieve lifetime financial independence in your twenties? You've (likely) got another 60-80 or more years ahead of you. It's going to be awful boring spending them all drinking Appletinis.
3. Your parents sound pretty smart, actually. They have given you some suggestions that are more likely to set you up for financial success than the ones you've thought of.
4. Whoever told you owning RE is passive income was lying to you. Owning RE, especially at the beginning, is a lot of work any way you slice it. Most of us who own RE came into it from somewhere else - either from working a regular job and squirreling away investment money into RE or working in a RE career and acquiring properties in the process.
5. Where do you expect the money to come from for investing in RE without a dependable income, especially since you don't come from any wealth? It's going to come from working a J-O-B.
My suggestions:
1. Get a part time job and start saving all that money. Show your parents you can both earn money and keep that money.
2. Go to college (or, alternatively, learn a good trade) and set yourself up for maximum earning potential in a field that's interesting to you.
3. Live below your means and work on getting a duplex (or a single family home and rent all the rooms to your frat brothers) and start from there.
Bottom line: you are looking at work as something to be avoided. That's more likely to make you homeless than wealthy.
There's only a few (great) people on there that have been mods longer than me, so here's my take on it from years of digesting it, in my usual assorted, scattered order:
1. Not everything that is reported needs to be moderated. There is a lot of grey area on this site, as there is on most sites, and in the interest of wanting to be fair to posters and not be ridiculously heavy handed, most mods will give posters the benefit of the doubt on the front end, maybe with removing a post and a warning or something similar. That means that the post that you reported maybe didn't get removed, but another one did, and the poster in question got the official message to knock it off. That might give someone the idea that the reporting is being ignored because they can't see the post(s) that have been removed. Generally most of us aren't going to go through the guilty party's profile and take down everything that qualifies because it takes a lot of time and effort, and most threads have an extremely short shelf life - no one is going to remember it or see it a couple of days from now. Which brings me to
2. Threads with a lot of active participation are going to be moderated more heavily and regularly than those with 1 or 2 posts. If no one, or virtually no one, is seeing it, it's not a judicious use of time to spend all day taking down people shouting in empty hallways. We (collectively, I speak for all of the mods here) would rather keep the active and engaged threads clean if given a choice.
3. Spam and spammers evolve - their techniques evolve, the posters change, the things that are being spammed change. Mods aren't always immediately hip to the latest scam flavor or spammer, so you should continue to report posts even if it seems like no one is listening because it helps all of us get better at spotting the guys (I'm from NJ, this means women too) who are clogging up the airwaves here.
4. More Mods won't necessarily change things that are complained about, because as my esteemed colleague @Nathan Gesner mentioned, it depends on time of day, forum(s) frequented, posting times, and other issues that sometimes means there's a whole bunch of us here at the same time and sometimes I'm the only guy here, or Nathan might be, or Ned, or someone else. Theoretically more Mods means more chances of catching stuff, so more help is generally always welcome, but no one should expect miracles.
5. The amount of spam & scams ebbs and flows in response to things that might have little to do with BP, and again sometimes that means response is a trailing effect. We (mods) will have a trainload of spammers, and all of us are doing double-time clearing things off, and all of a sudden it will get real quiet and we can go back to doing things that are usually more fun like posting and reading threads, which doesn't mean we become complacent but does mean maybe we're not as vigilant as usual.
All of that means you should continue to report anything you see, don't become disheartened if not everything gets taken down, and mostly just ignore the noise. I scan the forums every day, but I mostly ignore any threads that seem like a waste of my time either because they've already been fully answered, they're spammy in nature even if not explicitly against the rules, or they're just not something I'm interested in. If most people do the same, a lot of the scams & spams take care of themselves because there's no audience.
@Melanie Baldridge & @Nathan Gesner Your sensible advice will fall on deaf ears as its already been drowned out by those who share the ease in which success is earned through real estate. That's why I created a step-by-step approach for the investors you genuinely are trying to help, but cannot be deterred from continuing down the misguided path their mentors, coaches and gurus have sent them:
1. Register for courses and mentorship covering the BRRRR method and Subject To financing to become a multi-millionaire & reach financial freedom at an accelerated rate.
2. Form an asset protection plan that's so complexed it must be described in flow chart form and must include a Wyoming LLC, otherwise what's the point if they aren't "anonymous"?
3. Hone Microsoft Excel skills by creating 12 tab pro-formas to practice 1% rule underwriting on $100K single family homes.
4. Become a syndication Co-GP by lending the escrow funds for the true GP where you receive 1% of the GP share of project upside, then create website and social media marketing materials where you hold yourself out as THE GP for the syndication.
5. Marry someone wealthy
The "Don't die" strategy made me laugh 😂.
Last time we were in FL my granddaughter ordered a lemonade door dash or whatever the hell you call it. $14 by the time the guy left; I just about fell over dead. She could have used the car to get it herself or better yet we offered to make a fresh batch right there at the house but she wanted the Starbucks one. She better make a lot of money or marry someone rich because she has some unrealistic expectations.
Personally, I'm glad for the people who have no net worth and spend all their money on BS. Not only do they become our renters but they help keep the economy just chugging along.
@Jonathan Greene I’m traveling for work this week, but I’d like to get looped in on this.
We like attacks on bad ideas. Don’t like attacks on people. Could you DM the situation and I’ll talk it over with our moderation team (next week)?
I tend to like seeing you in action, so I’m curious what seems to have crossed the line this time.
Yeah, of course, and we talked about this at BPCON. My posts were removed, so only her posts are still there. I can tell you in advance what it is perceived as, but is not.
This is the forum - https://www.biggerpockets.com/forums/21/topics/1214210-real-...
You should be able to see my removed posts and what they were responding to.
My first response was a regular response, it's still there. She immediately went on attacks on me for not propping her up and questioning things. I only responded to her so it can't be off-topic and I never said a single thing off-color, an insult, or anything even close. She called me names (I don't care, just a point of reference) multiple times and that is all still there. Her posts are intentionally subversive and mine are just answers and jabbing her back without anything personal and always adding advice at the end.
These are her posts that are still there:
"it seems like you came here to be condescending rather than helpful. Next time, maybe just keep scrolling."
"You came on my post thinking you could mansplain to a newbie and you didn't like the response you got because you think you're some hotshot on an internet forum? I'm sure most of those posts are just you going back and forth with people like you are now. I'm in the business of real estate, not internet clout, but whatever makes you feel good about yourself buddy! "
"No babe, whats embarrassing is a grown man(?) attempting to internet bully someone who asked for a little advice. Nothing about your responses have been hard to handle, and if what I post doesn't make sense then perhaps you should work on your comprehension skills because let's face it, you're just a salty keyboard troll :("
As you can see, those are the ones that should have been removed and I was responding to those. The posts were likely removed because she used the words "mansplaining" and "bullying" and in my removed responses I showed how that wasn't even possible and didn't make sense.
Thanks, Scott.
I read through it and I think Jonathan is right, not necessarily in his posts but that the editing was one sided. The entire thread needed to be removed as the whole thing went off the rails with insults and nonsense that added nothing to the forums anyway, which is now done.
PS: you were just being Jersey. As a Jersey guy I get it 😝
Hi All, We plan to present the binder method to our inherited duplex tenants. Each unit currently pays the same amount ($1350). Question is if we have a conversation with each tenant about what they feel is a fair rent and one says $1375 and the other says $1400, and $1400 is our target - should we accept separate rent amounts? We do want to offer flexibility, our goal is to keep the tenants so if increasing only $25 a month the first year keeps them we are open to it. I believe they likely will talk, they share a back deck and am concerned the different rates may negatively impact the relationship if that scenario played out. Thanks in advance for any advice!
I would raise both the same amount. If you're going to do it in that fashion, I'd pick the smaller amount for both; one tenant will appreciate the fact that you didn't raise it as high as they suggested, and the other one will think it's fair. There have been some famous scientific studies that showed people were far more likely to want someone else knocked down to size than for themselves to be lifted higher if they perceived a situation was unfair. If you do it that way, the $1400 tenant is going to become bitter in short order.