All Forum Posts by: John Mireles

There's a big difference in pay between a front office data entry employee and a freelance bookkeeper. Most businesses only need a freelance bookkeeper a few hours a week so even if you're paying $100 an hour, it's nowhere near the $200k annual salary you mentioned.

Don't underestimate the value of skilled, diligent bookkeeper. Bookkeeping may seem easy, but wait until you have one make a mess of your books. It can cause troubles for years.

1) Where do you get your "private note" cash from?

2) What what's the loan term on the bank note? Assuming it's five years, what's the term on the private note? Will it be there when you need to refi?

There's a variety of justifications for piecing the corporate veil. Among them are fraud and undercapitalization. So if you intentionally undercapitalize the company - by removing all the equity for example - then you run the risk of piercing the LLC protection altogether. Of course if you do so in a fraudulent manner, then just double kiss it goodbye with possible sanctions and punitive damages. Yeah, you might get away with it, but if you don't, it could be pretty expensive "gotcha!"

Your client needs to talk to a family law attorney. I'm sure, after spending a fair amount of money on legal fees, he could get the court to remove her name from the title. But by that point, he'll be way behind on payments (and his credit will be trashed). Will it be worth it at that point?

The best way to get ex's to sign anything is with a wad of cash snuggled under their nose. Instead of paying a lawyer thousands, I'd suggest he pay her that money. Yes, it sucks to pay off a PIA ex and reward her bad behavior, but in the end it may be the cheapest, fastest route.

I agree completely. Not that negotiating a price and working through the expenses don't qualify for "most difficult," but, for me, the most time consuming part of fixing up a house is making all the myriad of decisions that are necessary to create a product that buyers will absolutely fall in love with and want to spend money on. To me, doing the work is pretty straightforward. Figuring out what goes in where, that's where you make your money because if you decide right, the buyers will be there. Decide wrong and you've got an expensive dud on your hands.

Once you do one though, then you can replicate the model and the process becomes easier.

Well these guys got nailed because they agreed with the city not to rent it out on a short term rental but did it anyways. That's just dumb. Anyhow, this is a good reminder for me to register my airbnb unit with the city and start paying my TOT taxes.

Okay... so let's say your siblings own a share of the house. Now the roof needs to be repaired at a cost of $8,000. Where does that money come from? What if at some point you rehab the house and decide to resell it. Who gets the benefit of the added value? You've put in the work and the money, why should they get a percentage of the extra profit?

What I see so often is that properties held by estates such as you're planning just end up getting ground down into the dirt from deferred maintenance because none of the owners want to spend the money. There's no incentive there - either they're not interested in the property other than it's a money stream or their effort won't be properly rewarded.

If you go down this road, plan ahead otherwise there's going to be plenty of headache and possibly, given that you've got family involved, heartache.

My suggestion is to just sell the house. Keep it simple. Avoid family entanglements. Then use the cash to find the best possible deal that you can. Once you have cash, you'll be in a much better position to get a deal that makes sense.

I use Paypal every day for credit card processing and sending of invoices. I don't use it for rent - I'm not willing to give up 3% of my rent to Paypal. But in general the system works pretty well.

One thing I don't like about it is that Paypal takes three days to get the cash into your bank account and you have to request it. It's not like a standard merchant processor that automatically dumps the money into your bank account.

Good tenants are hard to find. If I have a qualified tenant who needs to a few weeks, I'll have them sign the lease and pay first month plus security deposit up front. Yes, I may lose some rent but the alternative is that I'm faced with the prospect doing more marketing and more showings plus waiting another week - and then having a tenant who needs a week or so to move in. So really I haven't lost that much by going with the tenant who needs to wait.

I"ll take a bird in the hand any day...