All Forum Posts by: Pat L.

My big shot world traveller family member has been telling us for years we are 'doing it all wrong'. About 8 years ago as the proverbial 'business consultant' he insisted that he have a sit down. He interviewed us for about 2 hours about our strategies & a week later we received an 8-10 page dissertation detailing everything we were doing wrong & how we were going to go bankrupt. Just as most of my co-workers had opined during my youth before I retired at a young age.

For years since he has sent emails with all the doom & gloom REI click bait, especially during the 2008 crash. He was astonished that we kept accumulating & expanding especially as we are free & clear on everything. To this day he has NEVER owned any investment property.

None of his college graduated kids, (weighed down with student loan debt), owned property until married with children & are currently mortgaged 80-90%. All of our kids graduated without student loans & all were heavily invested, drawing passive income from the time they entered college & thereafter. All owned homes the year they graduated, none indebted over 75% LTV & all had passive income covering the majority of their costs.

Last week he spent another weekend with us at our Lakehouse. He had just turned 68 & intimated that he cannot afford to retire. Furthermore, he revealed he had already pulled the trigger early on social security. He then spent a lot of time asking about REI & how to get invested.

The week before that weekend my wife & I looked at several potential properties, visited the very happy buyers of another we just sold after 15 years of rental income & just had REI-laxing fun.

If you go vinyl as mentioned go with the best quality. Admittedly we have put down some HD sell offs for $1.10/sqft & the last batch was $12/box (23 sqft) & it was excellent. We have put these selloffs into several apartments & it has worn well.

We did 1800 sq ft at our Lakehouse expansion with a high end HD product ($2.56 sqft) 6 years ago & it has been amazing. No movement, no buckling or damage with a large family & dogs. Plus we winterize every year & the temps get to -20deg F so I was surprised there was NO shrinkage. BUT your knees will take a beating & the expletive will fly.

We also tried a glue down product in a flip & had it 'professionally' installed. That stuff was a nightmare & garbage, yet still ran >$3/sqft plus install.

Yes here 2 exits to the 'ground' are required so we were lucky to have the 2 stairways in place from days of old. Our 2nd floor units were equally adequate as all units open to a common hallway with two sets of stairs to the ground level at each end of that hallway. 

Good luck !!!

In upstate NY we had the building inspector shutdown an attic apartment that had been occupied for 24 years. So we had to add an egress window, but we already had the 2 required separate staircases down.  Then we also had to add it to the building fire sprinkler system with 24/7 1st responder monitoring.

We now get $875/month for what could have been disallowed.

We have a mix. The higher rent units $1250+ get a washer dryer Those below that rent (our min is $875) get a common laundry room with free washer dryer use. Those with washer/dryer love it & they are easy to rent. I metered the water/electric on the laundry room & found no excessive use of water/utilities.

Be careful, we just had our village deem Lakeshore STR a nuisance so all have to be 30+ days. This is after their pre-covid 2020 Village meetings suggesting that STR's were the norm as owners were trying compensate themselves for the (inflated) property taxes.

Then for some reason it all changed, citing noise, parking problems, septic o/flows etc etc. In fact one of our friends was blown in by a neighbor & she was booked solid into the middle of Sept. So now she's going to concentrate on the other 3 cottages she has elsewhere & hope those villages do not reneg on the STR concept.

We have had a few of those tenants & we always wish them well. Many moved on after a couple of years, but paid on-time & no issues as banks do NOT want to see evictions, judgements & one credit union actually asked for a landlords referral letter of good standing. 

We have a couple going on 7 years who rented from us until they could 'afford' a home of their own. Then new cars, big TV's, new furniture, job changes & of course our rent increases, depleted their savings for cash down. 

Just sold a nice property to a 3x married now single investor. 

As he said "all my ex-wives were good housekeepers...when we divorced they kept the house(s)".

Not in your area but often during heavy rains we would get it backing up. So after I replaced all the sewer lines under the basement floor to the property line I had one installed $500, (had to get a permit & use a lic. plumber).

Then when the city was replacing sewer lines in the street several of our neighbors homes suffered basement flooding with backed-up sewerage. City was reluctant to cover damages "that's what your insurance is for". Then it happened again when the city tested the fire hydrants and left one running & it flooded the basements again. City would not pay.

We survived that one and several others, best $500 I ever spent.

My 2 cents...

Up here any panel in a closet is a Code violation & must be moved.

Our insurance carrier will cancel I we have fuses so we would need to update that sub-panel & the Al circuitry by default when its moved. As for the new sub-panel, the 2008 National Electric Code states that the only acceptable way to wire a sub-panel is with a four-wire feed. Two hots, one ground, and one neutral wire. The grounds and neutrals must be isolated & the neutral should NOT be bonded to the sub-panel.