All Forum Posts by: Marcus Johnson

Just FYI, you can hack anything that's connected to the internet. Mac's aren't a free pass. In the future I would download Malwarebytes, Norton cleaner and spybot to sniff our some of these villians. That is when you have control of your computer.

Lastly, make sure your firewall is turned on whether it's a pc or mac. On a mac I would disable remote control and remote assistance. These are just some of the preventive measures any user can take on their own without spending the big bucks for a fix.

To add to the discussion regarding using leverage for buying rentals or buy and holds. I know of this person who makes 250k a year and has a primary residence worth 400k, she has 8 rentals that are all mortgaged and leveraged. She bought these right before the market crashed in 2008 and now most of them are $0-$100,000 underwater. The worst part is that some of them are vacant and not generating anything. Imagine not having tenants on a rental you owe a mortgage on that is way underwater.

Now she can wait out for the market to recover but in the meantime, she needs to feed some of the good ones with the bad ones. Her plan is to sell three of the bad ones and keep the other 5 hoping to get appreciation on them.

Just something to keep in mine when using leverage to buy and hold.

To me it's all about your own risk meter. risk=rewards. I personally don't want a lot of risk. I've seen to many people fail with real estate and credit card debt because they believed that nothing could ever go wrong and had no financial security blanket. I'm more of a middle of the road type of investor who has a good foundation and am not looking to overly leverage. In fact think of it like the S&P 500, since 1929 the market has average around 11% before inflation and after inflation roughly 8%. Now I can live with the 8% long term, but others might say, "why not take the risk and try to beat the S&P 500 and you could get returns of 15%, but what they aren't telling you is that only 16% of manage mutual fund brokers have beat the S&P 500 in the past 30 years, the other 84% failed.

The same is true with real estate, you could get very wealthy by leveraging, but you could also lose your shorts if you aren't careful. So ask yourself, what are you comfortable with? Am I willing to leverage a little here in hopes of better returns or should I use the rinse/repeated method?

Thanks for all of these challenges, my credit score is 790 and my wives is 820, all we have my wives Discover card that she uses for gas and I'm a joint member on it but don't use it, we don't carry a balance, we also have a small mortgage that we pay on monthly, we just paid off the other mortgage. It's totally false that you need 2 to 3 credit cards and lots of debt and pay it down each month, I've found a way to keep it minimal and still have very high credit scores. The only reason I keep my mortgage and one card and pay it off each month is so that we can play the credit score game.

Now if your going to tell everyone that you have to have a credit score to get a mortgage that is incorrect, you can get an mortgage company that does manual underwriting where they look at your w2's and your rental history and base it off of that.

I'd rather not go through that process because I thinks it's easier with real estate investing to have a credit score because it opens up more avenues.

As my above post stated I was referring to the credit score and Yes you are correct, a credit report shows to me way more then a score ever will. So I do agree with you there.

Not at all, I'm have no debt, make a good income and own my home. The reason I'm asking is because I come from the old school of thought that I don't borrow money for anything except a mortgage and for people like myself might not have a credit score, so I was seeing what other landlords philosophies were for those types of renters. Because it's interesting to me how much of a role the credit score is, as I stated in the previous post when I do start renting apartments that I will own I plan on not focusing on the credit score and deal more with their real life situations.

Why do you only mention working class/low income types, what about someone who makes six figures and doesn't use debt, but wants to rent? So what your saying is that if someone doesn't have a credit score then you will rent to them if they meet all of the other criteria? That's good to know, because I was hoping the credit score wasn't the only determining factor for many landlords. :/

When the day comes that I rent out apartments or a single family home, I plan on really digging into someone's money management history, income to debt ratio and renting history to determine eligibility. To me the credit score depending upon how it's been built isn't the best judge of character with the use of money. It shows that they borrowed a bunch of money and maybe paid it back.

I guess for anyone here on BP that is a owner of rental property.

Question, "So do you not rent to someone who doesn't have any debt, doesn't use credit which means they have no score and make plenty of income?" How do you handle these types of clientele since your using credit checks as a major factor?

Not to play devils advocate but one whose saved 200-300k in cash must have been doing something right, as in not spending foolishly or lavishly on material items. I'm just guessing this person has a low risk aversion, so I can understand her train of thought. What I believe she needs is someone who can help her invest that money in the market who is fee based and within ten years 300k based on the S&P500 average ROI would sum up to 650k and after 20 years she could have 1.3 million. Not sure of her age since you didn't mention it, but it seems as though real estate may appear risky in her eyes. I could be totally wrong. :)