All Forum Posts by: Michelle Bright

I used a high interest saving account. Try Capital One 360 or Ally Bank. Both savings accounts earn 1% currently. I use 360 for my investments and Ally personally. 

This forum is great. I am currently using Tenant Cloud to manage my 6 doors from 3 hours away. For $9 a month they provide rent payments, maintenance requests, messaging, screening, property listing and much more. I have been using them since October and have very little complaints. 

One tip that I do is I make sure to only use one card for all my purchases. This is of course separate from my personal banking accounts. 

I also use the same 24 hour home repair company. They service a property's AC and HVAC once a yr for $195 ($99 if you only have HVAC) and it enrolls you in their "Peace of Mind" program. It give us 24 hr service if needed without the 24 hr price. If they have to go out on holidays, nights or weekends their is no extra charge than if it were a Tuesday at 2 pm. Also if we do have them repair anything we get 10% off. They are extremely professional so the cost of having them go out verses trying to find the cheapest guy on craigslist is worth it to us. If you are in Fort Wayne, IN they are Korte Does It All.

Tenant Cloud and the 24 hr company help us manage our properties from a far pretty easily. We have only been doing it for a few months but I can say long distance land lording can be done!

Thank you @Kevin Romines!!! I greatly appreciate your response and that give me a lot of confidence because I have been battling with myself back and forth on if we should purchase here or not. Chicago is much more expensive than Indiana, much much more!

Who do I go about telling about the situation so that we could qualify for another FHA? Only the new lender or do I need to let the company currently servicing our mortgage know also? The company that we obtained the mortgage initially has since sold it to Oceanside Mortgage.

We moved out of state last fall. Our first purchase and first house hack was a duplex in Northeast Indiana. We moved to Illinois right at the one year mark because my husband's job transferred us. We are renting in IL now and was wondering if we are required to refi out of our FHA loan. If not required is there a benefit to doing so?

We only put down 3% on a $67k purchase price and have not been making extra payments so there is no equity to pull out. I just want to make sure we are doing the right thing.

We had a lender tell us once before if one has to move because of a job transfer or some other reason outside of their control there is no penalty if the move occurs within the first year of the FHA. We have paperwork from his employer of course but is this a true statement I heard from this one lender?

Thanks BP!

Thanks so much ladies for the help and insight!!!

Thanks Adrien S. ! I haven’t worked with First Merchants as a client or Realtor. I will reach out to someone there next time I’m visiting my properties. I like developing relationships with different banks. The smaller banks all offer so many different options...even sometimes no options.

Thank you both for your response! Dave Foster that is interesting and very creative! I ha not idea that could be a possible strategy. I plan on talking to my lender about our options today. We are looking to purchase or their property sometime this year. We love our professional careers and we are on the path of purchasing one property a year to reach our goal of financial freedom.

Thank y'all for the replies! 

Yes, it is a 30 yr fixed conventional at 5.125% 

Broke out the appraisal from last year...

I misspoke. They did in fact use the sales comparison approach but also calculated the income approach. The sale approach supports the $71k value we would like to refi it at. Thank you both for making me pull my paper work back to to review!!!

I looked back on pg 3 at the reconciliation section to read the appraisals description on why there is a $16k difference from the sales vs income. The income approach actually values it at $85k.

Another lesson learned here is to keep everything organized. I was able to go right to my filing system to pull out the appraisal. Thanks again everyone!  

Hi @Patrice Boenzi! We are looking to at least break even. We cash flowed on our house hack in Indiana and that gloriousness allowed us to purchase our second property. If it could be done again fantastic!! However, I am looking to give my sweet husband some peace on our second house hack and not live in a construction zone for a year. Haha. 

We would prefer our unit be a 2/2 and a yard for the pup. Near transit for our tenant(s) and ourselves, separate entrances, free parking/ garage/ space to build a garage and we would mind there being room to add value. We used to Airbnb two properties so we would be open to either having a the other unit(s) as short term or long term rentals.

Hi @Brie Schmidt!!

According to our DTI ratio and online affordability calculator from our bank we could afford $260k on the conservation side up to $373k. The challenge/ opportunity to learn a creative financing opportunity would be with our down payment. We are hoping to refi one of our properties in Indiana to help us with the down payment.

I am looking into ways to obtain a down payment for an owner occupied property multifamily property as a back up plan.