All Forum Posts by: Sarah Preston

@Tiyona Marshall I had a title search done with Frontier Title and the property owner had a lot of other outstanding liens. I didn't want to wade into a quagmire. The ROI in terms of time and money figuring things out just wasn't there.

Hey @Maurice D. - I am in this exact situation. It's land but the auction keeps getting cancelled due to Covid. I have already talked to the owner and they've agreed to work with me prior to the auction. I would like to use this as an opportunity to help them restore their credit as well. I'm about to contact the owner to give me authority to contact the credit agency on their behalf (per the credit agency) so I'm not quite into the process yet. Do you have a link to a good resource about how to go about this? I just learned this was possible a few days ago. Any info you can provide would be immensely helpful, Google is failing me thus far since my situation is so specific. (I'm also in Texas, so assuming similar laws to yours.)

@Basit Siddiqi $40k for investment. My target market is $120-$150k so that's what I based it on. We don't have a hard deadline, so have time to continue education, etc. Thanks for your help!

@Mark Sewell Smart. Thank you!

@Mike Krieg I hadn't thought about syndication but that is an interesting option. I'll definitely look into it since we aren't on a hard timetable. Thanks so much.

@Robert Leonard Thank you. Great advice. We both have pretty demanding jobs, so a highly involved project might be out of scope for us but I won't rule out fix and flip and BRRR.

Hi! My husband and I have always planned to use REI as a means for early(ish) retirement. We're in the saving phase and we're about 1/2 way to having a nest egg of 6 months of expenses. We were almost there but got sidelined with a crazy expensive AC/Furnace replacement in the home we own. The good news is, we were able to pay cash to fix it!

Current plan is to save $ for a down payment on an investment property for the next year while I shore up my knowledge on the business and the local market. I found Chad Carson's ep on the BP Real Estate podcast about using real estate to retire early and I'm about 90% through his book as of right now. 

We're looking to buy something in late 2019 or early 2020. My husband is very risk averse and I think we'll probably be more "slow and steady" than high risk quick climbers. (We both graduated from college at the beginning of the crash so we know how tough things can get in a downturn.) We both have good jobs and we're almost living on one income. I'm planning on revising our budget so we can bank my full income in 2019 which would give us about 40k+ cash to play with if all goes well. I have a wonderful Real Estate agent who we bought our current home through and I trust, so I am planning to seek his advice on market strategy. I have also seen good advice in the forums on getting involved with the local REIA, so I'm planning to do that.

Do you guys have any other advice for a new investor in the Houston market? (We live in North Spring near 99.) Neither of us are handy so while fix and flip seems attractive to get a jump on our REI career, I'm not sure it's the best plan for us with no handiness and no current contractor contacts. Right now, my thought is to purchase a small multi-family unit (duplex or triplex) as a long term hold. Not quite sure farther than that. Does this strategy seem sound? Is it "too safe"? Is there a better way I could go about it? These forums have been wonderful and any advice is much appreciated!