All Forum Posts by: Joseph Delia

Slightly, but not enough to absorb the tax increase.  So a little bit of a "split the difference".   But that is only a year 1 answer.  I don't need to slam my tenants immediately, rather instead make it up over time.   I like both of my tenants in the two properties we manage so I'm in no hurry to apply a shock to their system.

What a great question.  I recently had this discussion with another parent at my kid's school who also makes real estate investments.  Our families have been on vacation together in Florida and Hawaii.  My sister now lives in Florida (East Coast of FL) and I myself lived in St. Pete over 20 years ago.

We both (the other parent and I) independently decided AGAINST investing in Florida, even though we were both looking to diversify our real estate holdings (and had put Florida on the short list, at first).  The long term prospects just don't "feel" that great.  Besides the bugs and the gators and the subpar education system (sorry, but it's true), it really comes down to we "don't know what we're really buying in terms of exposure to future flooding events".  It doesn't help that the National Floodplain maps are outdated and universally acknowledged to be "politically influenced" (as certain neighborhoods in Houston demonstrated).

Maybe it's a bit short-sighted but with plenty of solid places to invest (major cities with booming job markets), it makes pulling the trigger on Florida an unenthusiastic choice.

That depends.  Is investing with a mindset to "just break even with my costs" considered investing for cash flow or investing for appreciation?  Although I fully expect appreciation, if it doesn't appreciate a cent I'm still comfortable knowing the mortgage got paid off by somebody else over 30 years.  This is a great luxury mindset to have by the way in a market as high cost as Seattle is presently.

I sort of look at it like this (and I've read all of the "invest for cash flow books" guidance as welll), I have extra investment cash AFTER accounting for all of my retirement investments, etc.  I wish to diversify beyond the stock/bond markets.  So what do I do with my excess cash?  I prefer to put it in real estate and more specifically, in a market like Puget Sound where I have knowledge and experience.

I've never really known how to classify RE investors like me, but as I talk to peers, I'm finding it more common than I originally imagined.

Yeah, happy to hear the news.  As the judge said, it was a well intentioned effort with "laudable goals", but IMO simply impractical to execute.

Our system of checks and balances works as it should in Seattle and Washington state (not so sure about the other Washington).

I don't want to be a "sky is falling" kind of a guy, but I have an Uncle who lives in Vero Beach, a cousin who lives in Melbourne, and my sister just moved to Vero as well.  I also lived in St. Pete for a number of years after college.

Every time I visit (Melbourne/Vero) I think about buying an investment property and every time I come away with the conclusion that I don't want Florida real estate climate change exposure.  I expect flood insurance laws and availability to change in the next few years.

Also, alligators and bugs ;-).

I'm in the software industry myself and while I have no problems with subscription business models, I don't understand QuickBooks'.  $27/month for a product that used to cost $300 every 3 years or so?  That seems outrageous and I don't know if their "cloud enabled features" justify that mark up.

+1 on Excel.  It's also subscription these days (through Office 365) but the pricing makes more sense to me ($10/month for ALL of Office, not just Excel).

Hello Larry (fellow PNWer!).

The $500K tax free exclusion is called just that, the "$250,000/$500,000 Home Sales exclusion" and is a pretty fundamental part of homeownership.  Just do a search for "NOLO" and "home sales exclusion" for details, but basically, you don't pay taxes ($250K if single, $500K if married) on selling a property if you've lived in it for 2 out of the last 5 years (this, by a hairsbreadth, did NOT get changed to five out of eight years by the recent tax bill, although it was proposed.  Lots of screaming Americans and Realtors correctly freaked out (and to this day, I would like to know which Congresspersons or WH staffers put it into the draft package)).

Lot of good responses here.  I would only add that one needs to be resistant to those who make over-simplifying statements (e.g., "buying a home is one of the worst financial decisions you can make" or increasingly I'm hearing "college isn't worth the cost").

The oversimplified answers to nuanced/complex questions is a dangerous path and not for the savvy.  This applies in politics too ;-).

@Jack B.

As one who owns property and pays taxes in BOTH the Seattle area as well as New Jersey, I must say that the two markets are vastly different and should not be munged.

Washington has no income tax.  New Jersey has Top 5 marginal in nation.    NJ property tax is also tops in the nation.  WA is somewhere in the middle.  In addition, Seattle/King County is an absolutely booming job market with no signs of slowing down (first and foremost because it is THE job market for cloud computing expertise and increasingly becoming THE market for AI expertise as not only national players but international Juggernauts locate there...those two tech spaces are the future of everything for the foreseeable future).

So my unscientific data point of one (two really, my highly educated wife agrees with me) tells me that NJ is going to flatline and maybe even decrease while you will gain absolutely zero benefit if you hope for that kind of market softening in Seattle Metro.