All Forum Posts by: Jeff Deville

Alerts set, podcast 10 playing, itunes votes cast, pro-plan mulling. I'm availing myself of all of your hard work. Thanks @Brandon.

Hi Tammy, I'm new too, but I'd also recommend listening to the podcasts. One of the last questions that is always asked of each guest is what their favorite real estate and fav biz book in general is. That may be data that feeds into Josh's link to the top 21 books. But either way, the podcasts have been fantastic thus far. Highly recommended (And yes Josh, I've cast my 5 star vote in iTunes :-) )

Hi @Peter Dunne, no worries on timing. I've got a lot of ignorance to dispel first. We're close enough that we should grab coffee or something sometime. I'll send you a connect request. Thanks

My wife and I are getting started in real estate. We don't have much background in the field yet. We've read a few books, and taken a short 2 day online class. She worked as an apartment office manager once upon a time. But aside from owning our own home, we're green.

I'm a high end software developer who's worked at small startups, and big behemoth's over the years. I have a 2 yr old son with another on the way. So my first goal is to be able spend more time with my kids and my wife, by following the Kiyosaki principles of his Cashflow Quadrant without sacrificing our standard of living. I love software and am planning on using my work to finance some of our real estate investments. In 5 years or so, I'd like to be able to see my income from real estate eclipse what I make in software development, so that I can either get further into real estate, or go back to software startups that I'm passionate about.

At this moment, I've probably not got too much to offer in real estate knowledge, but I've been the CTO at a few of my startups, so if you have any questions on how technology could be brought to bear on a real estate problem, I'm your guy. Let me know how I can help.

As for immediate plans/goals, we're looking to start building our team at the moment. I guess the first thing we need is an investment-friendly realtor, but any suggestions on local folks in all of the relevant industries would really be appreciated, other than accounting. I think we have that role wrapped up.

We're gravitating toward buy and rent options, and will be trying to get a sense for where the numbers make that strategy feasible. (It appears that rents are lower than mortgages in the Ardmore area, so we'll start expanding our scope until we can find an area that makes sense.)

Wow, what a great response, thanks @Bill Gulley Thank you to everyone, actually. I have no idea how long it would have taken me to find out even half of this.

Bill, I frankly didn't really have a plan. I listened to a talk through richdadtraining about investing other people's money that was laying fallow, and am trying to train myself to look for those types of opportunities. Sounds like this was a dramatically bad first idea. :-) I had envisioned a mix of cd's and bonds if I wasn't educated yet, perhaps micro-loans for people's education (what upstart.com is doing already, as I found out). I'm not far enough along or confident enough to have acted on anything without a mentor to guide me.

At any rate, my friend is paying 120/mo into this thing, and the only value he's getting is snow removal. That still seems insane to me, and I figured if there was a way for those folks to not have to pay as much, that they'd have jumped at the opportunity.

Ah well, I'm a little wiser. Thank you again, everyone.

Fair enough, Wayne, Mike. Thanks for the feedback! I guess at a minimum I should be able to tell my friend he should look into whether they can curtail their fees.

Thank you for the feedback, Jeff!

Do you have any notion regarding how much surplus they would need in that account before some portion of it would not be considered short term? If it helps, there are 38 homes, and it appears to be about .5mi of road.

Appreciate the insight. It'll be one less thing to waste my time with as I work on dispelling ignorance. :-)

I have a friend in a small neighborhood whose roads are private. The owners all have to put money in to a pot so that if the roads need work at some point, the work will be done. This is, as I understand it, about the extent of their 'HOA'. I put it in quotes, because I'm not 100% certain that is what this entity really is.

At any rate, this account has over 100k in it right now, all sitting in a money market account, losing value to inflation. I'd like to offer them a win-win situation such that they will derive a greater return, while still having access to the funds needed on demand, but be able to invest this money myself.

I'm 100% new to all of this (I haven't even sent my self-intro post yet), but I was wondering if anyone could suggest to me whether my idea is legal, reasonable, and perhaps what I should look into to getting the ball rolling. It seems like a great opportunity to me, so please disabuse me of my ignorance if it's not!

Also, does anyone have any notion of how much might they need at any one time that I'd need to be able to deliver in a hurry? How much does it cost to fix a pothole?