All Forum Posts by: Justin Juhan

So, who knows a company that prints and mails a check drawn from your account every month?

I've been paying bills by writing checks and mailing aside for one or two auto-drafts my entire life.  

Since we purchased 3 properties this year I started to get overwhelmed as it was eating too much of my time, I started to streamline. Set up everything for auto-draft except.....

We purchased a Duplex with Seller Financing and the only payment method we have is to mail a check to the gentleman every month. For the next 7 years.. 

Looking for some advice here. We recently purchased a duplex in a good school district we like to buy into. The issue I'm having is when I post the listing on any of the websites it has a next city over address which does not have good schools and the market is much lower. Does anyone have any tips to get a property just over the city limits to show up in a search for the actual school district it is in?  To be clear it is in the attendance zone of the good schools I just don't know how to get it to show up in that search. When I use hotpads etc. and search the school district it does not show up.

+1 for google voice, rings just like the cell and voice-text voicemail transcripts and text messages pop up on my computer while at work. I can quickly reply and never even have to pick up my phone.  All you need is a gmail.  On a side note we only have one property but we setup a gmail just for that address and put it in the lease as the primary non-emergency communication. This way any maint. requests go to that email, all communications are stored for that property, and the tenant can never say "I didn't know the email address" because it is literally the street address to the house. 

Good day,

My wife and I are looking at buying a second rental property. We opened a Heloc on our primary ($60k) and plan to use that for the down payment.

I have not spoken with lenders but from my prior experience I'm assuming we will have a min down payment of 15%.

We would likely do a one-time "draw" at around 6.5-7% interest on the Heloc for the down payment.

My question would be is it better to put 20% down and not pay PMI but pay 7% interest on that extra 5% down.

OR Better to put 15% down, Pay PMI, but amortize that 5% at ~4.5% interest over 30 years?

Key aspects:

I would estimate our purchase price to be around $150-170k.

Heloc is not interest only, Partially amortized.

I would never agree to a loan that does not get rid of PMI after 80% LTV

Cash-out refi is not really an option in our market unless we find a diamond in the rough because the LTV is not worth the trouble.

Thanks!

@Natalie Schanne - the home has only appreciated about 40k, the other 100k in equity came from proceeds on the sale of our previous primary we purchased in 2010.

Our plan is to live in this house until all our children are out of school. We bought into the district for that reason, but we got in early and see that we could make ~20k to invest in other properties just by moving twice.

So if we rent for 2 years, depreciate those years and sell it in 20 years at that time we would pay taxes on ~25% of 2/29 the (original purchase price +any rehab)

At original purchase price of 280k that means we would owe about $5000 in 20 years? Not bad for 20k in investment money now and hopefully this house will  appreciate much more than that over 20 years.

Please let me Know if I'm missing something. Thanks!

Good Day,

My wife and I are just getting started in real estate investing. We purchased an investment property (single family) at the end of last year an put in lots of sweat equity, it is now bringing in about $400 a month in income. We purchased our primary residence 3 years ago and did a recast on the mortgage after selling our previous primary so we have about 140k in equity.  By doing so our payment is low enough and our rent value is high enough in the area we could bring in $800-$1000 a month in income by renting it out. It is move in ready.

We would like to purchase a property to live in and fix up while we rent our primary for 2 years then move back in as our primary (once our first child is school age).

The advantages I see are essentially this sets up up to purchase at least 2 more properties (one with the extra income and one we would be living in)

The dis-advantages I see are potential tax issues.

What disadvantages, if any, do you see?

Thank you for any input on this situation.