All Forum Posts by: Richard Yount

Hello All,

Thank you in advance for the help.  I'm reaching out as I'm getting ready to make my first purchase of a property.  To give you the details on the property, it's a single family residence with two in law suites.  I would be staying in one of the suites, and rent out the main living area and the other suite.  Being that many of you have been around the block with this before, and I'm a rookie, I was hoping I could lean on you for some advice on best practices for setting up your finances for a rental property (or house hack with two tenant incomes).  A few questions that I have for you all:

1. Looking for addvice on how to manage and track expenses and income on the property through excel.  Both to keep my records straight so I can have a clear eye on things, and for tax purposes.

2. Where the income should physically deposited.  In my current personal account or in a new account set up specifically for this property?

3. What I should be doing with my reserves set aside monthly for repairs, cap ex, vacancy, etc?

Thanks again for the help everyone.  If you all of other tips or potential pitfalls that might be beneficial for me to consider up front, I'd be happy to take that advice as well.  I appreciate you all!  Hope everyone's having a great Friday!

Steve,

Thank you very much for your response.  If you don't mind, I'm going to follow you and Betsy down this rabbit hole.  If you don't mind, I'll skip over the "lovey dovie" details of how absolutely amazing my girlfriend and is and how we have a strong committed relationship that revolves around our communication, and I'll ask how you would recommend we go into this property together?  Say if we were to treat it just like a regular partnership between to non lovey dovie individuals, how would an agreement like that be structured?  I'm assuming we'd hire an attorney to put together paperwork, but do you (or anyone else) happen to the basics of a a real estate partnership would be structured between two equal partners?

Thanks again to everyone for the help!

Hello All,

I have a few questions about my first potential property that I will be buying and I wanted to pose them here on the forums to seek advice.  My girlfriend and I are looking at buying our first property in the Central Florida/Orlando area.  It is a single family home with two in law suites attached to the property (under the same roof).  We would be living in one of them, and renting out the main area (2/1.5) and the other in law suite (1/1).  Those two units bring in $1100 and $800 respectively and our expenses on the property come out to roughly $1700 including repairs, cap ex, and some vacancy.  We are excited that it works well for us as a primary residence so we can save money (and even cash flow) so we can begin looking into other rental properties to invest in.  My question for you all is whether we should be breaking our back looking for a mortgage company that will forgo mortgage insurance to keep our expenses as low as possible?  Between the two of us, our combined income is only $80k so we are under the $109k threshold to have mortgage insurance still be tax deductible.  We currently have a lender that will allow us to do a 5% down conventional mortgage (we need a low down payment option) without mortgage insurance, but the fees associated with this lender come out to about 2k more than a few others that I have shopped around.  Do you think it would behoove us to pay the additional 2k up front, make this property cash flow roughly $125/month better, but forgo the potential benefit of having that tax deduction (to anyone who responds, I'm not very tax savvy, so please be gentle with your responses to this), or should we keep the mortgage insurance as this tax deduction might be beneficial.  Something else to consider is that if we were to move out of the property, it would be cash flowing close to $400, so will we need this tax deduction when we have it later on as a rental property?

Thanks for your help with this in advance! Feel free to let me know if you need more information, I'll be happy to provide!

Richard