All Forum Posts by: Mark Whitted

Update: Second payment arrived a little late. Probably because they sent it to the wrong address. REALLY wrong address. Payments SHOULD be going directly to the IRA custodian. Instead, the first two have come to my home address. But they have my home address wrong by a digit. (If this is the biggest issue we ever have, I'm good.) So I have to mail it to the IRA custodian. This causes delays in posting to my account. Not a big deal in this case since once it's in the IRA account, it's making something like a whopping 0.04% money market interest. If this were NOT in my IRA, it would probably be ACH/EFT. If it WERE still a check, and we had the correct address, I think we would be getting payments before the first of the month.

Being claimed as a dependent by your parents has nothing to do with you paying your own taxes. If you are working, you are paying your own taxes. (Hopefully!) Your parents claim you as a dependent because they provide for the majority of your living expenses. You could be an investor and make $1,000,000 and if your parents were OK with you just putting it all in savings or blowing it on video games while they paid your living expenses, they could still claim you as a dependent. So go for it! Get out there. Make deals. Make a million dollars, DON'T blow it on video games, support yourself and take away your parents' deduction. Trust me. They won't mind.

If the house is free and clear, either you paid cash or you have paid off the original loan, and you take out a $200,000 loan on a $250,000 property, one way to think of it is that you just bought the house from yourself with a $50,000 down payment and a $200,000 loan. It the free and clear cases, it is a little confusing to say "refinance" because you're not refinancing, you're just mortgaging the property. Another way to accomplish the same thing is a home equity line of credit or HELOC. The advantage of this is it's a line of credit, so you can use what you need, when you need; kind of like a credit card. Use $50,000 to rehab a property, sell the property and repay your HELOC. Only pay interest on the $50,000, not the entire $200,000. And only for the time you hade the money. Then take $75,000 to do another rehab. No need to go through any new loan headaches.

If he's any good, just hire him to do the work. And let the lease be the lease. Two separate transactions. There would be tax implications with his plan too.

@Mohamed Tamraz, My wife and I visited Morris Invest's operations in Indianapolis last month. PM me for details.

@Cody L. Hope the current bank isn't now going to call the CURRENT loan! lol

Marcel Bacchus Get involved with a local REIA group or two. Two that I recommend are NTAREI (general meetings the 3rd Thursday of each month at HI Express LBJ & Preston and various $20-60 educational meetings in between) and DFW Investors (next monthly meeting 7/10, free in advance, $10 at the door). Between these and BP, you'll be in good shape. Save the $27k for investing.

I haven't read every post in this thread, but it seems to be all about managing DM campaigns, maybe managing fix & flips, or actual rental property management. I was just listening to a podcast where an investor couple with several buy and hold cashflow rentals with several different property management companies were talking about tracking their properties, managing their managers, and keeping up with things like tax and insurance bills, deeds and such using spreadsheets. Is there any kind of rental property portfolio inventory database software available? 

Being an enterprise software developer with over 35 years of experience and trying to transition to Web/app development, I think I may see an opportunity here. Anybody else seeing this? 

Edward Robinson Welcome! I'm not much ahead of you. I've been on BP for about 3 months now. I have a similar lifestyle situation as an IT consultant. When I'm working, I'm a lot of times only home Thursday night through Sunday afternoon/evening. I suggest you take note of the podcasts of the BP podcast guests and "catch up" on those and the BP podcast. At least the ones with general REI content or the REI areas that you are interested in. (Buy and hold rentals, fix and flips, wholesaling...) Also, try to take advantage of your road trips and take a look at different markets around the country for possible out of state investing. (Even though IL is in the "mid-west", I have heard that it is not real "landlord friendly" like IN, OH, MI, TN...) Good luck, and drop me a colleague request if you are interested in keeping in touch.

IF so... 🙄