All Forum Posts by: Jason Barnett

Have you considered talking to a realtor in your area that actually INVESTS in real estate? If not then do so immediately for 2 reasons:

1. These people already do what it is that you're hoping to do; they search for cash rich deals on the MLS and know what you're looking for.
2. They can tell you about all of the added headaches / liability that goes along with having the license while doing RE investing.

Because business is business and personal is personal.

If your business is seperated from your personal life (and IMHO it should be) then you wouldn't want to mix your personal assets in with your business assets. Why worry about losing your personal residence? Cut down on that stress.

Great comments posted here. For a long time now I've placed a high value on time and education, but it wasn't until recently that I became good at delayed gratification. Now I'm a little older and a little wiser and I have a little bit more money in my pocket.

But here is my dilemma.

My fiance whom I love very much just seems to have a difficult time with delayed gratification. At times she can be very much like the person that cmacone has described. This is tough! Deep down I know that sacrificing a little bit right now will make our lives together easier down the road, but at times it is difficult to convince my fiance to "see things my way". Needless to say this can put quite a bit of strain on our personal relationship that I value very much. Can someone perhaps give me some tips on how to deal with this?

What does seasoning of the title mean?

You'll have to check the section 8 lease to determine what the due date for rent is; in my area tenants have until the 5th of each month. If you talk to section 8 about the problem tenant and complain that they are not paying their rent on time then section 8 can kick them out of the program. In my area this is a big deal because there is a long waiting list to get onto the program (your friend can find out by calling the office and see if they are taking new applications). So if your tenant cares about getting their money from section 8 then they will pay their share of the rent ON TIME.

Or rather than taking your complaint to section 8, your friend can simply threaten the tenant and inform them you plan on taking your complaint to section 8. And you tell them they will lose section 8 eligibility. Most tenants can put things together pretty quickly at that point.

All good observations. Now three of my own:

1. I think "Oil" is being confused with "Gasoline". Yes it is true that oil is needed in order to make gasoline. However, what we sometimes forget are the subsidies to oil companies that lower their costs of production.

2. True that we are getting better at extracting more oil. But I've read that geologists estimate we have already used somewhere between 25% and 75% of the world's oil (depends on who you believe). Thanks to industrial growth in China you can be certain that demand for oil is going to increase even if we become more efficient in our usage of gasoline.

3. I have been reading some pseudo-science book that talks about hydrogen being the next great energy boom. Basic argument here is that we know how to harness the power of hydrogen, but it's just not cost-efficient / safe enough yet for everyday use (imagine a car collision when one car is full of hydrogen gas!)

I use GMail from Google. My experience with it has been mostly good; it gives me a 100% free access to email that stores over 2.5 GB worth of messages (and my storage quota grows every day).

If anyone is interested in trying this service out, feel free to email me and I will send you an invite. I still have 99 invites left...

I posted here a few weeks ago about a problem that I was having with a Section 8 tenant. For those that don't know my situation, here it was:

I had mold damage in an apartment and a tenant that had complained to the health department about it (2 days after she notified me of the problem!). I read the complaint letter from the health department and I agreed to do everything that was asked of me (and then some).

During this time my tenant harassed me saying that I didn't care about her health and that she wanted to move out of the apartment. She called Section 8 several times and asked them if they could break the lease, but they said the only way out was for me to agree to let the tenant go. However mad this women made me, she had a financial obligation (a lease) and I refused to break the lease because it is not easy to get new tenants this time of year.

The tenant made several trips to doctors and had the doctors write letters to me declaring she should not be around mold. Yet I never agreed to break her contract all this time because I agreed to clean up all of the mold problems.

Then last Friday I received a phone call; it was the Deputy Director of the local Section 8 office. We spoke for some time over this issue and I reiterated that I had cleaning crews ready to go and that I would do everything that the health department recommended. At this point the Deputy Director told me, "Well we want her out of the apartment and we are willing to pay rent on the apartment if you are willing to break the lease." After some negotiation we agreed in principle that Section 8 would give me everything that they owed to me through the end of this month and they would also give me 4 months' worth of rent. Yesterday I received the paperwork for this agreement and the rest is history.

The moral of this story? Know your rights and keep your cool no matter what a tenant says to you. People can say whatever they want, but legal documents are binding. In my case I was able to get rid of a PROBLEM TENANT (no prior history though... hmmm....) and I actually made money off of the deal. KNOW YOUR RIGHTS!!!

Here's the way that I organize my information.

3 cabinets:
1 for vendors (people that sell stuff to you)
1 for customers (since I'm a landlord this means my tenants)
1 for general / administrative items (company documents of incorporation, tax documents)

This is how I file information inside each cabinet.

- Organize alphabetically (except XYZ can be combined since they're rare)
- File according to first letter of the company's name. In the case of an individual I file by "last name, first name".
- If I expect to have a lot of paperwork with a company (i.e. 10+ pages in a year) then I create an individual folder for that company.
- I also have miscellaneous folders for each letter of the alphabet. So if I don't expect much paperwork for a company (like ZEP paper products) then I just throw them into the miscellaneous folder (for ZEP I would file into XYZ - misc.)
- Finally, within each folder I organize chronologically with the newest ones in front.

The reason I do it the way I describe above is because I'm usually looking for something for a specific company and I have some clue about when it happened. So if I think I signed a contract with DMHA back in August then it becomes easy to search.

Last but not least. If you do this for a few years then you're going to have a buildup of files. It is probably a good idea to hold onto records for 5 years, but you don't need to keep them all in a filing cabinet. So you take all of the folders out of your filing cabinets and box them up. Be sure to write on the outside of these boxes what you have inside. With these boxed up files the main thing you want to know is what year's information is in each box. For example, I might write "2005 Vendor records A-D".

Actually I thought of one other item that sometimes confuses people... you also want to include property taxes as part of your expenses.

And do you have coin operated machines? Include the revenue / expense on them as well if you have them.