All Forum Posts by: Ben H.

I live in Frisco and have one rental property in Frisco and one in McKinney. I too have found it to be a little challenging to find good deals in North Texas and am mainly concerned of how fast the properties have risen. They might be used to these kind of fluctuations in California and New York but this is not common in Texas. I question whether Texas will have any pullback or if the word has gotten out how great Texas is and this will become more of a norm. Something that I have done on my last deal and have another one in the works has been to solicit with my Family's friends that want to cash out of the equity of their home that I will buy their home directly if they reduce the price by half the realtor commissions. I will them finance the home over 15 years instead of 30 as I want to build equity value over cash flow. The hope is that I buy one property per year and in 15 years from now I would get an annual raise from a property being paid off. It helps our friends out because they get another 3% in their pocket. I also let them do a month to month leaseback from me until they find their perfect replacement home. Being they have already cashed out of their home, they have the cash in the bank to make an offer with no contingencies which is needed in today's market if you want a chance to get the house.

When it comes to pet odors, apartments deal with this all the time and you may want to research their tricks of the trade. My experience has been if you can't take the odor out, then you need to look at ways to lock the odor in. I had a place with really bad cat odor. Cats tend to pee along the walls. We pulled the carpet but also took out the baseboards alone with the sheetrock behind the baseboards. We then used several coats polyurethane to coat the border where the carpet tacks were to lock in the remaining smell. We then put a taller baseboard in and replaced the carpet and pad. I would suggest doing something similar with the borders for hardwoods. Then sand down the hardwood floor, stain the wood a darker color to hide any remaining stains, followed by locking the odor in with polyurethane. I hope this helps.

Hello Cody. I am new to this forum but I did exactly that to help fund the down payment for a property and thought I would share some perspective. I went back and forth on whether to take a loan out against my 401k but talked myself into it. I convinced myself that I was only further diversifying my stock portfolio into something more stable. It was also something I could put my own energy in to see how big I could make it. I was tired of my investment manager having all the fun but needed an initial investment to get started. The way I saw it is if I could focus on real estate and my investment manager focuses on the stock market, then at retirement, I should be ok if one investment strategy fell short as I had a hedge. I agree that you are not getting taxed twice. I would also ask who would you rather be paying interest to. The bank or your retirement account. The good news is that I guaranteed a 4% return on my $50k. Yes it came out of my pocket but It would still have had to come out of my pocket in some way as the money would not just magically appear no matter how hard I wished for it. The bad news is if the market returned 10%, then I just lost 6%. The other thing to factor in is job stability. If you lose your job, then you still have to make the payments or take the remaining balance as a hardship withdraw which also has penalties you will pay. I also think there are some restrictions on being able to just take it as a hardship withdraw as well. However, if you got a loan from a bank, you will have to continue to make those as well. The reality was that the stock market return went up 12% that year but my investment property made 14%. I also saw my property increase in value. In the end, I weighed the risks and went in with a plan that my real estate venture might not make the returns the stock market would every year I have the loan out. I told myself that this was going to be a one time investment to get me started. I hope this helps!