All Forum Posts by: Natalie Keller

hey folks! we are new to being landlords. I would appreciate your input. Earlier today we received the following message from our tenants:

"Hi [...] I wanted to reach out about an incident this morning regarding the garage door. I went to back up and did not realize the garage door was open 3/4 of the way. (Im assuming it stopped due to being too cold) that said my car did hit it and so shayne called a repair guy and he came out and fixed it to be functional. The cost was 550 and we paid it already. The repair guy did say that he recommends getting a new one due to it being 20 years old. I’m not sure what you feel we should do next about payments etc. as it was an accident but the garage door didn’t open all the way. When you are able can you give my husband a call as he was the one who directly worked with the garage repair guy. If you have any further questions I’m more than happy to chat and can call you later in the work day."

I went through our lease agreement and tried to locate some relevant clauses. 

Overall, would we be considered responsible for the cost of the repair? they didn't notify us of the incident when it happened. we are not sure where to go from here. thank you!

Hi all! 

We are new to this and these are our first renters.
Here is the scenario:
The renter reported an incident from earlier in the day.

" I went to back up and did not realize the garage was open 3/4 of the way. ( I am assuming it stopped due to being too cold). that said my car hit it and so my husband called a repair guy and he came out and fixed it to be functional. The cost was 550 and we paid it already. The repair guy did say that he recommends getting a new one due to it being 20 years old. I am not sure what you feel we should do next about payments etc. as it was an accident but the garage door did not open all the way."

What are your initial thoughts? how should we handle the situation? What should be our next steps?

Thank you,

Natalie

Looking for a fresh perspective on our situation.

We own one house (single family home) that we just refinanced and converted into a rental. We are expecting around $400 cash flow each month from it.

In the meantime, we moved in with our friends in order to pay off our remaining debt:

Student loans: 30K (at around 6% interest)

Car loan: 7,500 (at 5.5%, will be paid off in April 2022)

2nd Car loan: 9,000 (at 3.45%, will be paid off June 2024)

Total: 46,500

Current DTI with all these loans is 30%. After we pay off the loans, the only thing we will have is our primary mortgage, which will put us at 17% DTI.

We would like to try and keep our first property as rental, while buying the 2nd one as our primary.

We are projected to be done with all that debt by November 2021 (in 9 more months)

At that point, we can start saving aggressively for a 2nd house (try to get 10% down + use quite from our first home to get to 20% in order to avoid PMI)

Given our financial situation,

- should we commit to paying off the student loans?

- Should we start saving for the second down payment instead?

- What options are we not seeing?

Are their other ways to avoid PMI (outside of putting 20% down)?

We can stay with our friends for 18 months max and at that point in time I would really want to get my dream house (in our area it would be around $500K, which means we would need 100K down if we wanted to avoid PMI).

Again, looking for some new perspectives, blind spots, or any other knowledge/information/ideas we just don’t have at this time.