All Forum Posts by: Nathan Lichtman

This is a very hard area to learn as a new investor. Accountants usually don't give you the time of day if you are under 1m from my experience and aren't apt to answer a bundle of questions. My question is this, I was blessed this year with a huge income in cash. I had been into real-estate for awhile for the tax benefits but I'm realising as a Canadian, I can only write off what I've earned on the property plus like a 5000 allowance every year. Which is basically nothing. It lets me write off like 14000. 

But if I earned lets so 200,000 outside of real-estate, then real-estate doesn't help me mitigate taxes? Am I missing something? I know there are a lot of ways to write off money thru real-estate however my accountant explained you can only write off whatever equates to your real-estate income plus a little bit from more complicated terms they explained, but nothing to the amounts i need. I really want to buy more properties to mitigate taxes but I don't see how. Any experienced people have suggestions? 

This was my initial theory.. Put 20% down, have family co-sign ( their security is in the 20%, so if the house is repoed or i fail to make payment they can sell it and loose up to 20% without taking a hit ), and eventually remove them from the mortgage. My main fear was, how do i prove to the bank to let me take that mortgage on myself/company. Do i need to prove over X amount of years the house pays for itself via renters? 

Do you have any literature you'd recommend for your roll over theory of starting with an MIC and going to an A scale ledner? I'm not familar with how that works! Why after a year does an A scale lender take you? Because you have shown you can rent out the house? 

Thanks so much for the reply! 

My rebuttal to OPM as a small investor (i own one house that im flipping atm) is i haven't built up the contacts to do that with yet. And diving right into OPM's could leave me at risk of people who are veterans in the industry taking advantage of me. Even with buying my first home i'm discovering mistakes I've made that I couldn't account for from podcasts and youtube videos. I assumed that after getting 3 or 4 properties through methods of co-signers, I'd make contacts and be able to use OPM's from there. Starting off with that seems kind of naïve as I could easily just loose it all in a bad deal. 

Is there a resource you recommend to study where to source loans from other then big banks? I have a realtor and a lawyer but no one with extensive outside lending experience. My goal is to buy and hold out of all deals (except for the odd one). 

Thanks for any advise! 

I have been obsessed with real-estate for a few years now. I recently was blessed with a decent cash supply. I've invested a lot of time learning how to buy houses but I'm still quite new at it. A lot of what I learn ends up being American. I have ample people that would co-sign on a house for me to get another one but I'd like to take out a business loan instead as there are more write off potentials then a personal mortgage. Does anyone have a starting path to your first few properties in Canada if you have lets say for argument sake, 100k in cash. How many properties would you go for and how? Would you incorporate, would you LLC for legal reasons? I'm really intrigued! Any input would be greatly appreciated!

The question is. If you had 100k in Canada and a job that produces 40k/yr, what would you do over the next 4 years in real-estate?