All Forum Posts by: Jim K.

@PJ Singh

Lotsa pictures, please, and make sure you include a couple wide-angles of the base. I am a home improvement contractor in Pennsylvania with experience building showers like these. There's one specific reason this might be happening that I suspect most -- the way the shower pan was installed/built. This whole, "water is getting behind the tiles and seeping to the bottom" stuff is baloney. What's much more likely according to what you've described is that water is getting into the bottom of the backerboard used behind the tile from the shower pan and migrating up the wall through capillary action. I'll likely be able to tell from pictures.

There's no leak issue. The paint would be obviously peeling underneath the shower pan. It wouldn't take a plumber, your handyman would have seen it. This ain't about the boyfriend, either. A properly installed walk-in shower will easily outlast the life of a residential property with minimal maintenance.

Get the pictures and there's a high probability I'll have a good answer for you. Good luck!

@Caleb Heimsoth

There are two problems with having no liability insurance on a rental property: it's very hard to borrow money on the property without insurance on it and when you get sued for something that happened on the property, the lawyer does not have a policy to go after and will have to go after all your combined assets.

A lot of inexperienced rental owners believe that as long as they have the property in an LLC, they've kept themselves safe, because that's what a lot of salesmen tell them, a whole lot of baloney about not "piercing the corporate veil." It sounds good when the salesmen push it over the phone, but believe you me, there's no judge in American who won't hesitate to rule against you if you as a landlord obviously caused the tenant some form of injury and the LLC is obviously just there to confuse the issue of who owns the property and is liable for any overlooked maintenance that caused the tenant's broken leg, etc.

An LLC is not an insurance policy. If you have a policy on the property, and the lawyer has an obvious target, the low-hanging fruit is to go after the policy's liability limits. It's hard for a lawyer to argue to a judge and harder for a ruling to stand on appeal that insurance policy limits shouldn't apply to a particular case. If you don't have an insurance policy, the lawyer has to go after something, and will therefore try to justify going after a judgment on you and all your assets. This opens you up to very expensive risk, because in order to fight this kind of lawsuit, well, the tenant's lawyer is working on a contingency, while you have to pay your own lawyers. A policy fight can be settled in minutes, a judgment against you could strip your of other assets. I am not a lawyer and this is only my understanding of it from a rental property investor's standpoint.

To sum up, our lawyer's advice was very simple, and also echoed by our CPA. They are both specialists in working with rental property owners. "Do whatever you have to do, pay whatever you have to pay, to get liability insurance on a rental property."

@Robbie Wyness

Thanks a million for the video. The wrapping does do wonders. I'm not a huge fan of window wrapping in rentals, but with the lead paint problems we have down here in Pittsburgh in older residential housing from the 20's and 30's, soffit and fascia wraps are a must, especially on brick-veneered buildings, which really makes the peeling paint on the other facade elements stand out. They'll deny your liability  insurance in a heartbeat for the kind of peeling paint issues we get down here.

One trick, when you need an absolute straight line of paint anywhere, is to use a utility knife to score the line first. You'll find you can paint right up to that line with some practice and touch. Generally, a variant of this is most useful when you're cutting in walls up to the ceiling. You do the ceiling first. Then you drag a flathead screwdriver carefully down the line between the wall and the ceiling. You now have a slight gouge that you can paint right up to with a good brush. Works just as well for doing accent walls well.

When I was your age I was 100% financially supporting my mother. If I hadn't, she would have had to beg on the streets of a foreign country for food and medicine for her chronic conditions, or get an illegal job. I myself hadn't worked a legal job for three years, I just couldn't make enough to support a household that way. So I worked in the black market in my field in that country, ducked both the universal military draft and the taxman, and did what I had to do to take care of my family. I broke up with my girlfriend, put my head down, and worked as much as I could under Third World conditions for little more than Third World pay. Sadly, my mother died just one year after we got back to the States, but at least I got her out of there.

So I feel I can tell you with confidence that you don't NEED "your own space" and "sense of independence." Those are phantom needs. They're things you want, badly, and you're not naming them as such. There are plenty of people in the USA living four to a bedroom just happy to be here and away from where they came from. I'm no better or more human or more worthy by birth or station than they are, and neither are you.

Dave Ramsey talks about getting "gazelle intense." Complaining about living rent free with your mother...come on, you're a grown man and on living on your mother's charity. You know exactly what he'd say about your lack of gratitude for the "economic inpatient support" you're getting. I sincerely doubt you don't have stories of real privation in your own family, people who suffered to make sure you had enough to feel entitled to these phantom needs you've mentioned here. Get intense, Kris. The cheetah is after you and it hasn't eaten in days.

By all means, start learning about REI. By all means, save the $5K. By all means, put the down payment down on a duplex. For the love of sweet Jesus, Kris, never post your credit score in a public forum next to your full name. If you start investing in real estate and take on debt, treat it like a business you're starting and treat it as business debt. Look for something you can be sure you'll be able to pay back within the confines of your emergency fund for three months if Murphy strikes. Don't trust your lender to tell you how much you can afford -- do you remember the line in Ramsey's book about how it's like trusting a fox to tell you how many chickens you have in the henhouse?

So I would get the duplex AND keep living very gratefully with my mother and accepting her sacrifices for me, and put every cent my business produces towards paying down the student debt to keep my Debt Snowball going. Still feeling the lack of your independence and space? LIVE LIKE NO ONE ELSE WILL SO LATER YOU CAN LIVE LIKE NO ONE ELSE CAN. Listen to Ramsey.

That's my two cents. Good luck to you whatever you choose to do.

@Rigo V.

@Rigo V.

Given any choice, I prefer triple-polyurethaned-in-place solid oak and tile for my own low-cost rentals. I believe this is by far the wisest choice IF you plan on owning the rental for years AND you know how to do a good installation yourself/are willing to learn AND you or your own employees do your own flooring maintenance over those years under your watchful eye, not a third-party contractor. It takes time and it takes effort to learn how to install tile and hardwood and floor trim. It's worth it to a landlord who fulfills the criteria above.

BUT, if you have a third party doing maintenance, and you as the landlord don't know tile and hardwood, and you're a million miles away trusting that your expense reports indicate the work and materials that really went into your floors, you will get fleeced with tile and hardwood, however honest you feel your property manager is. It would take a saint to resist ripping you off, and that saint would not be the patron saint of builders, St. Joseph. Old Joe would have been right there with his holy hand out to feed his family.

If he was a landlord for 30 years AND he needs to move in with a roommate to make ends meet AND he gives you lip about paying an application fee (which is what he's doing) AND he sucks at computers to the point where he trusts screenshots to convince others about things like credit AND he's starting off a landlord-tenant relationship like this, he has a much bigger problem than his attitude. It takes a really stupid person to do things like this. Sooner or later, if he becomes your tenant, you're going to be asked to subsidize his stupidity. I would most likely reject this tenant after seeking some advice from my lawyer. If you do not have a local real estate lawyer to discuss this with before making a decision, your team is missing a member.

Yes, you have an existing tenant that will be miffed by this. If she doesn't understand why this happened after you explain it all to her, then you will have discovered that you've had a stupidity problem on your hands all along and this was a really good thing because it was an opportunity to confirm the stupidity problem. Plan your exit strategy. Your tenants need to have the basic intellectual capacity to understand your point of view when it comes to approving new tenants.

Things like this are one of the good reasons I hide my last name when posting on this site, as wisely indicated by Nicole A. above.

@Shawn Moser

Absolutely you should pay for a 1-on-1 mentor, with weekly calls, for $12,000. You'll skip all the tedious falling down that beginners who don't pay for mentors go through, avoid all the costly mistakes. You'll beat the learning curve. You'll have someone to fall back on. Because after all, the most valuable thing you have is your time, especially starting out. If I could go back and find a highly competent, well-informed mentor for that amount of money, I'd jump on the opportunity in a heartbeat.

The most I paid for real estate coaching was $150 and while I haven't totally stepped on my crank yet in the five years since I bought my first investment property, the speed at which I've progressed has not impressed me greatly. But I know enough about myself to know that some people learn best by coaching, some people learn best by researching and experimentation, and some people never learn. I've tried to coach people who really just wanted to fall to their knees, close their eyes, and open their mouths with an anticipatory sigh to let their godlike mentor to stick a silver spoon in there, and that ain't me.

So whatever you choose, don't expect any coach or any other source of information to have all the answers.

Here's a screenshot of the City of Pittsburgh in the same racial dot map. 26.1% of the inhabitants of the City identify as Black. Is it impossibly difficult to see where most of them live, or can you draw the barbed wire quite easily?

Here's a screenshot of Allegheny County in the University of Virginia's racial dot map. 12.5% of Allegheny County's residents identify as Black.  Is it that difficult to see where they live? Here are the statistics for Black residents in the four counties surrounding Allegheny County: Beaver: 0.1%, Butler: 0.09%, Westmoreland: 0.1%, Washington: 0.09%.