All Forum Posts by: Sam Poland

Hi everyone,

I'm still relatively new to the idea of buying rental properties, and I'm having a hard time seeing how the payoff plan would work. My family and I live in Taipei, and we own a house in Massachusetts. We have close to 400k in equity in that house, and we are cash flowing like crazy there. It seems obvious that we should be leveraging the equity in that house, but, as I said, I don't exactly understand how we would make the money work for us in the best way.

It seems like using a HELOC to BRRRR would be a really obvious choice, but I'm wondering how we would go about paying back the HELOC. It makes sense that the rent from a place that we rehabbed would pay for the mortgage after we refinanced, but what do people do to pay down the HELOC and not get crushed by interest. Our current loan on the house in Massachusetts is 3%, so whenever I try to run numbers, it is clear that we would pay way way more in interest by switching to a HELOC. Because it is a non-residence there is no way for us to keep that extremely cheap loan.

Do people just use any extra money after landlord expenses to slowly pay down the HELOC? Do people put the money from the refinance in the HELOC to keep the interest payments down until the next rehab purchase?

Finally, I'm just wondering what people use to run the numbers on this stuff. I know that we should get our equity and money working for us, but there is certainly a cheaper way to do that too, and we could use some help trying to figure out different payoff plans, loan options, etc.

We'd appreciate any help anyone can give, and we're grateful to be a part of this community.

Thank you all!

Sam

Lien, thank you so much for writing. We're open to some real estate wherever we can find it, and we're not married to the Boston area at all. What would the process of cashing out on the rental be? Is that a HELOC, or is there a different way to access that equity?

Thanks again for writing, and thanks to everyone else for making me feel so welcome.

Hi everyone,

My name is Sam, and I'm curious if anyone has had a similar experience to ours. I lived in New England for most of my life until two years ago when I moved with my wife and my now 6 and 7 year old children to Taiwan to teach at an American School here. We own a house in Massachusetts that is making great money from rent and gives us something like 400k in equity (we bought in 2013 and refinanced in 2021). We are curious about investing from here for things like helping with early retirement in 15 years or so and our kids college education. We don't need the cash flow right now, and we are probably a year away from having 100k in cash with which we could buy something. The things we are weighing are single vs. multi families, HELOC vs. saving for a year and trying to get something with cash, how difficult it might be to make a purchase from here, and location. I'd love to hear any thoughts, and I'm happy to be part of this community.

Thank you!

Sam