All Forum Posts by: Jody Sperling

House hacking will not improve your chances of getting a house. The bank will look at your savings position, your current employment and your credit history/worthiness. If you are approved for a loan, you will fall into a category reflective of your financial income and how often you've paid bills on time.

That doesn't reduce the powerfulness of house hacking a bit though. Because once you're in the house, you start a time clock where that house's rental income will count toward your future loanworthiness. Not to mention, when you eliminate your greatest monthly expense, you starkly improve your cash flow. Best of luck!

I don't know the Orlando market, but I would go buy (or have your PM install) some desiccants. Damp Rid is a great brand. You can buy them to hang in closets, and they suck up all the moisture in the air. This will significantly reduce spores.

For the bathroom, provide bleach and a spray bottle. Provide printed instructions on anti-microbial cleaning practices.

This will probably not be enough to remediate the situation entirely, but it should greatly control it. If there are bathroom fans, remind the tenant to run them for at least an hour after every shower/bath.

My sister lived in an apartment where the complex Property Manager failed to respond at all to her complaints about mold and that turned into a nearly fatal case of mold-induced pneumonia. The issue can be very serious if not addressed, but properly addressed, it can be handled inexpensively and build trust with the tenant. Best of luck!

You'll definitely be better off going through a brokerage. Type "Insurance Brokerage" and your city and state on a google search and call three of them. Ask them all to quote you on your properties. Tell them you are shopping your business. (Farmers, State Farm, and American Family are not brokerages. They are captive agents who have to quote you their carrier and not any other carrier. Avoid them.)

With insurance, I used to sell it, it's incredibly important to make sure each agent quoting you knows you are shopping your business. If they don't, they'll just go with whichever company gives them the best commission.

Now, not all insurance agents are that way, but it's too common for them to think, what's the difference between $950 and $1,000 a year? And those are the same agents who won't shop  your business because it's only going up 3% annually. Don't be loyal until they've earned it.

Lastly, a note on companies. Chances are, if you've seen the insurer run ads during the Super Bowl, they're spending your premium on those commercials, meaning, they aren't going to be the cheapest option, though they will be the most common: All State, Farmers, Liberty Mutual. Gieco and Progressive can be different because they don't have direct agents, so they don't share revenue, but things like Lemonade can beat Geico and Progressive since they don't market on TV.

I know I'm throwing a lot at you. If you don't do anything else, call three brokerages in your area and tell them you're shopping your business and you'll be fine, even if you end up placing with a big company. Best of luck!

Traveling nurses are a great option for 6 months or less. Otherwise, you can do the shortest of the short and open it up to VRBO and Air BnB for overnight stays. Put the price low enough and you should get decent response. Perhaps not the funnest option, but anyone can do anything for six months when the payoff is future wealth.

Google "STR traveling nurses", and you should get plenty of info on that, by the way. Best of luck!

Full disclosure on this answer, I work for a direct mail company.

Pricewise, your best per-household cost is going to be through Valassis, Mspark, or Mailbox Merchant. They're all tied together, with Valassis handing urban markets and the east, Mspark handling "rural" markets and the Midwest, and Mailbox Merchant handling the West Coast, including its urban centers.

I'm at Mspark, so each company will have a couple nuances specific to them, but if you wanted to run postcards, for example, you could do so to a blanket zip code, portions of zip codes, or even carrier routes, for $0.20 a mailbox. You have to commit to at least 10k pieces, and every drop happens on the last Tuesday of the month.

EDDM through the post office will cost you around $0.30 per household, but you could hit fewer households.

If you want to have the head-of-household's name on each postcard, it gets more tricky, and you might be best served going through smaller specialty mailing companies. It depends on what your strategy is. Hope this is informative and helpful. Feel free to message me with additional questions.

Go to any local bank or credit union, not a national outfit, and ask for commercial lending. Tell the commercial lender you are looking for a first Lien HELOC on a rental property. I guarantee banks in Vegas offer it, but you may have trouble finding it. Don't waste your time with anything in a second position as it will only harm your cash flow.

Another great option is the Life Changer Loan. You can look up Life Changer Loan online and find their website. They'll be licensed in Nevada and all they do is that one product. It's basically a HELOC with a few cool additional features. @Justin Phillips may be able to help you if that's something you want to look into.

I understand where you're coming from, @Tom O., but I still think home ownership is a prison and not a blessing, unless people use their homes to produce wealth by forcing appreciation. Otherwise they are settling for giving less to the next generation. 

At least, rent. It's proven to be cheaper, and invest the difference. And there's no way I can argue with the 5,000% increase in Bitcoin over the past 4 years, but I can say that my returns on investment houses have been infinite in several cases.

I bought, rehabbed, rented and refinanced all without using my money, which allowed me to do the same thing over again. Now someone else's money is making me infinite returns. So I'll stand by my original conclusion.

I often ask for private loans on this kind of thing, and much like your credit report, it can stress your relationships if you aren't careful.

My strategy has been to ask people, "Do you know anyone who would be interested in lending $x.xx at 14% interest for x amount of months? If so, I'm looking to complete a flip of a property I own right now. I'd appreciate if you'd put me in touch with that person."

If the person happens to be interested, they'll reply, "Yeah. I know someone. Me." Or in the case of my most recent flip, a friend from ages ago connected me with his parents who ended up lending me $50,000 for six months. It can go either way, but because you aren't asking that person directly, they tend not to feel pressured and it leaves the core relationship intact.

Best of luck!

I love, love, love this discussion. Talking about money should be as natural as talking about the weather. Those of us who have it, by and large, worked for it. Like you, I grew up poor. Not government-cheese-poor, but grape-drink-and-bologna-on-Wonder-Bread poor.

No one taught me how to make or spend money. The extent of my financial education was from my dad, and I'm grateful to him that he tried anything. We used the cash-in-envelopes system. All that taught me was that my meager paycheck didn't go very far.

I knew a few wealthy people around us, but you couldn't go up to them and ask, how'd you do it? And I knew a lot of people who looked wealthy, but lived way above their means.

I'm frankly lucky to have stumbled onto a resource on YouTube that changed my life. YouTube! I'm a millionaire because I saw a video on YouTube. That's both sad and fortunate. The evil empire isn't all bad, I guess. But anyway, that early video was one of Clayton Morris's and I watched a ton of his stuff, then found, who I thought was an inferior educator, Brandon Turner. (Yes, humble pie, history proved me wrong.) That set up the real estate investing.

But at the same time, I came across videos about velocity banking, infinite banking, and money management. Those are the ones that showed me the tragedy of what we're doing. By hiding our wealth, refusing to talk about money, bowing to people who get uncomfortable with money talks, and people who accuse us of bragging, we're participating in their enslavement to banks.

People actually think thirty-year mortgages are a good thing! People thing their primary home is an asset! People believe the stock market is the surest way to build wealth! People buy brand new cars off the lot with money they don't have, take trips to the beach with credit cards they can't repay.

Talk about money. Say to people, I'm sorry if this makes you uncomfortable, but I came from government cheese and now I sleep on a mattress of Benjamins with a pillow of solid gold and you can too, with relative ease and speed. 

Just by paying attention to where money goes first, you can quadruple your wealth in two years and not even notice a difference in your lifestyle. That's a start. Imagine if you used that new wealth to buy assets. But I'm rambling. Please talk more about money. Don't be embarrassed. Don't be ashamed.

Find a bank in Texas that will give you a First Lien HELOC on the property. The fees to get a HELOC will be about a fifth of what you'd pay if you refinanced. You may pay a slightly higher percent interest, BUT you'll pay fewer dollars in interest because every dollar you pay toward principal lowers the amount of money you pay interest on, whereas a mortgage is a set cost and no matter what you do, you can't escape the monthly set cost.

Once you have the First Lien HELOC, start using it as your checking and savings account. Instead of setting aside x number of dollars, put every dollar into the HELOC. If you end up needing those dollars, you can always pull them back out of the line of credit, but as long as you don't need those dollars, they're going to pay down your principal and interest costs.

People use this strategy to pay off houses in as little as three years, and it really works, but if you simply want to use it to build up equity for an investment purchase—which is how I use mine—you can withdraw a huge chunk when a good property comes along and use the equity in your home to buy an investment. Then, you just continue the process of using the HELOC like savings and checking etc...

Most primary First Lien HELOCs will give you up to 90% LTV on the appraised value of the house, too, so you'd have access to more cash. The only warning here is that you can't live above your means and make this strategy work for you. Best of luck!