All Forum Posts by: Mariah Jeffery

Oh, you didn't make it hard to understand, it was just a complicated topic. Thanks for taking the time to spell everything out for me!

I may possibly need a partner in the future. I'm going to try to digest what Financexaminer suggested, which means I'm going to have to read it 6 or 7 more times, LOL. Essentially if the sellers don't agree to take less than 20% down, I don't think even with my parents' help we'll be able to come up with the roughly $400K we'd need to buy the other 44 units. I'm thinking about this batch now and there's enough to think about, but I may search for partners in a few months when the dust settles.

Nothing painful about it when I went through it. In fact it was less painful because you only have to send paystubs and bank statements for one person, assuming you have individual accounts. If the accounts are joint you'll have some extra steps.

Not true. I've been married since before I bought my first property and all of our FNMA backed loans are in either his name or mine. We both have more than 4. The key to this is to make enough income individually and have a good enough credit score that you both qualify.

No, these sellers move slowly but we close on 7/15! Everything is going well so far. I also have my parents lined up to partner with me in case the sellers want to make another deal in 6 months.

I'm constantly getting those 0% interest balance transfer checks from my credit card company. Most of the time they have a balance transfer fee of 3%, but my husband and I just each received a targeted offer with no fee.

Our highest mortgage rate is 6.75% and it's a simple interest mortgage, meaning interest is calculated daily. The mortgages are through a credit union so we have a lot of flexibility with paying early.

Between my husband and myself, we can take out about $45K on 0% interest and have to pay it back in 1 year. Our mortgage payments with this credit union are about $4K/month. Here is what I'm thinking we'll do.

1. Write the balance transfer checks to ourselves and cash them in our checking account with the credit union.
2. Have the credit union apply $44K, which is 11 months of mortgage payments at $4K/month, to our mortgage and have them suspend payments for the next 11 months.
3. Use the money we would have paid toward our mortgage to pay off the 0% credit card balance.
4. Profit. $44K * 6.75% * 11/12 = $2,722.50 in interest saved.

After coming up with this plan, I realized we could still profit from the offers with the 3% balance transfer fee given that our interest rate is 6.75%. The downside is our credit scores might take a temporary hit, but they're in the 790's now so we should be ok. We're about to buy 8 houses so I don't think we'll buy any more for at least 6 months.

Am I missing anything?

Yes, still working out the details but we're planning to close in July. Thanks!

At the end of the month I'm going to close on 8 properties on the same day. The title companies charge $318 per property each to the buyer and seller. I haven't asked yet if they will discount this fee. If they say no, would there be any benefit to going with a real estate attorney for closing? I assume the title co. still needs to be involved to issue the title insurance, but they charge separately for that, so maybe we could find an RE attorney to handle the signing of the paperwork separately?

I just heard from the daughter. Sellers will not go for 5% down; 20% is the lowest they'll go for. However, they proposed a smaller package deal of 8 single family homes with a combined tax assessed value of $473K and total rents of $5,250/month for a price of $375K, financed at 5% interest w/ 20% down, 25 year am. I told her this offer looks good on paper and if due diligence checks out, we'll have a deal.

Thanks everyone for your help! I'd love to own all 52 but I think this is a safer option, and just as good of a deal on a smaller subset. The daughter also mentioned that if things go well and we establish a good payment history, we may be able to talk the parents into a lower down payment on another batch in 6 months. Plus it will give us some practice with the seller financing thing. I'm excited now!

I have 23 units already so it would be a huge increase but better than going from 0.

These properties are all paid off so at least that won't be an issue.

The main reason I want no due on sale clause is because I like this 5% interest rate so much, I'd like to have the option to invest funds received from a sale in other properties, but also the option to pay down the debt as well. Plus, it would complicate things to pay part of the debt off. I'm not sure how the sellers feel about this.

Thanks for the referral to Angelo Russo. I'll contact him and go from there.

I'd like to find a good informative book to educate myself on the subject, even though a lawyer will draw up the paperwork. Does anyone have any recommendations?