All Forum Posts by: Jason V.

I honestly never even tried to contact the inspection company - I knew they were never going to accept any liability or responsibility for it, and they knew as well as I did that it shouldn't have been missed. That was also at a time where I was much more in the "screw it, I'll just fix it myself" mindset. 

I just wrote it off as a learning experience, and now I know to do my own inspection in addition to the professional inspections I have done. 

I love talking to other folks, like you and your wife, who are passionate about helping kids and taking action to give back. We chose international adoptions for a bunch of reasons I won't bore everyone with, but we love seeing folks who are dedicated to domestic foster care and adoption as well. 

Feel free to send me a message here so we can swap emails, and I'll be happy to answer any questions you have about our adoptions, and what life in a family with special needs looks like. Or you can go right to 'Reece's Rainbow' which is an organization that has helped us with all 4 of our adoptions, and has an awesome (if sometimes overly passionate) online community. 

Thanks for all the kind words about our family - they are appreciated. We're just normal people who choose to do things a little differently than everyone else, and are extremely fortunate to be able to do so.  We are incredibly Blessed by our children!

@Paul Bowers - Small World! Once upon a time I worked in sales for the Barnard dealership in Geneva, and I happen to be a Newark native. I'm sure we know a lot of the same people. 

Yep: either teach them how to do it and give them all of the control, or treat them as investors and give them none of the control and a fixed return as specified in your very detailed and attorney reviewed contract.

My folks wanted (and still want) to invest with my wife and I, because they've seen our successes as investors. Knowing them as well as I do, I offered to teach them everything I know (which isn't all that much) so they could do it themselves, or to have them act as a private money source for rehab deals. 

Offer plenty of instruction and advice, and let them do it on their own. Without knowing your situation, or your family situation, your recipe sounds like it might cause some friction at Thanksgiving. Same with being their PM. Make your 10%+first month (or whatever is going rate in your area) or happily find them a local PM company. 

Absolutely, positively, no matter what: take the time and spend the money to set things up with your attorney and their attorney. It's more important to do that with family than it is with a stranger on the street, because you don't have to go to Christmas the the stranger's house every year. 

A seller's disclosure isn't worth the paper it's printed on. That's not me being cynical, or saying that sellers lie, it's just the truth.

A while back, I was talking to a potential seller, who happened to be a little bit older. I noticed the roof had some curling shingles around the edges, so I asked her if she knew how old it was. She told me it was replaced (which I took to mean a full tear-off) 2-3 years ago by 'Smith' Roofing. Since I happen to know the owner of that company, and thought the shingles looked older than that from the ground, I gave the roofer a call. He had to dig back a bit, but found out they had done the job 7 years ago, and it wasn't a tear-off when they did it, meaning the next one would have to be, and probably sooner than later (in Western New York.) 

Now, I could assume Mrs. Seller was lying to me, or I could assume she just forgot when she had it done. I find that as I get older, it becomes a lot more likely that I would make the same mistake concerning the passage of time. The same came be said of water heaters and furnaces (check the dates on them!) and everything else concerning the house. 

The idea of using an inspector is a good one, but it isn't foolproof either. The first house I ever bought, I had the inspection done by a local professional outfit that all the local realtors recommended. The inspector missed a couple of huge issues, which wound up costing me a lot of extra money, and worse, time. 

Somewhere down the line, the previous owners, strapped for cash, knew the roof needed replacement. There was already a third layer on, which may have been acceptable at the time, but was not allowed by the time they went to replace it. The roofer they hired, rather than do the tear-off (which they couldn't afford) nailed new drip edge on top of the third layer of shingles, all the way around the roof, then put a 4th layer on, effectively hiding the 3 layers of shingle underneath. The next roofer to come along saw drip edge and a single layer of shingles, so he put on another layer of shingles, meaning that when I bought the house it had 5 layers of shingles on it, which were all completely shot. Even worse, walking on the roof felt solid, because apparently 5 layers of shingles nailed together can hide some pretty serious structural issues. 

So when the roof finally came off, I not only had 5 layers of shingles on both the house and attached garage (21 square in total) I wound up having to re-deck the entire house, and fix a cracked roof truss.

Thank God I did it myself with some hired help, or I would have been looking at a $13,000-$15,000 job, easy.

Additionally, the house was originally wired with Aluminum wire, which may or may not be the worst thing in the world, depending on the electrician you talk to. One of the previous owners decided to 'fix' this by rewiring the house. Unfortunately, they ran 14/2 wire from every outlet in a room to a (not to code) junction box above the rooms, wire-nutted everything together in the box, and cut off all of the ground wires both in the outlet boxes and junction boxes. So nothing in the entire house was grounded properly, meaning I had to rewire the entire house. 

Both of these issues were missed by the inspector, and may have been missed by many inspectors, but will never be missed by me again - that's for sure. And the previous owners may, or may not, have known about any or all of them - but none of it was on the disclosure, nor would I expect it to be. 

Even if they knew, proving it is a whole 'nother deal. 

I might have to suck it up and pick up a copy. And I say "suck it up" because I really, really don't care for Grant Cardone. I respect what he's been able to do with his business (assuming I have an accurate picture of it in my mind) but all the interviews I've seen with him (albeit short ones) and any of his articles that I've read just don't sit well with me, and I've always assumed his long-format stuff would be the same way. 

But it gets recommended to me constantly, so maybe I should get over myself and give it a shot. 

Thanks!

Yep - all of our kids are adopted actually. We adopted our first daughter from Colombia in 2013, she's 8 now. Our oldest is 14, and our youngest is 5 - they were adopted at the same time from Armenia, and have been home about 2.5 years now. All three of our kids have Down syndrome, and the younger two are still non-verbal. 

The son we're about to finalize the adoption of is 10, hard of hearing (potentially correctable) and has Cerebral Palsy. 

And I completely agree, and really appreciate your tactful words of caution. If we weren't already experienced and comfortable handling children with histories of trauma and neglect, this adoption would weigh a lot more heavily on my mind than it does. As it stands, this is just what normal for us looks like - pretty similar to a family in their 4th pregnancy. Of course, most babies don't pop out the size of a 10 year old with all sorts of emotional baggage :-)

Hey All! It's been a while since I've posted here, but I thought this would be a good place to come for some input. 

I've been a member for coming up on two years, and have been investing in real estate for a while longer than that, always part-time. When the market was 'bad' my wife and I were fairly aggressive, and we might be what a lot of newer folks consider 'successful' with our real estate investing. 

On top of our full-time jobs (my wife is an RN, and I'm an Automation Engineer) we own a small business that makes specialty service tools for a couple of specific industries. It's a small market, but lucrative, and there's a ton of room for growth in a couple of different areas. 

Most importantly, we have three children, and are in the final steps of adopting our 4th. 

None of these things are terribly new, and for years we've managed it all well - as well as any 'normal' people manage their 'normal' lives anyway. But for the last 3-4 months, I just can't seem to find my drive. I have all the opportunities in the world, but just can't seem to find the motivation to even try to capitalize on them, other than going through the motions. 

So I'm looking for some suggestions of great books to read that have helped you out of a similar slump. I've tried to get back to reading the business books that I have, but I can't even seem to focus on those the way I used to. It's just so much easier to pick up a fiction novel, or (horror of horrors) watch something on YouTube or Netflix. I've got a shelf full of business/motivational books, quite a few of them unread, but I really need something different to shake things up I think. 

I'm not even sure what I'm looking for specifically - I just need to bust out of this slump. 

Thanks all!

My 'Why' might seem a little strange to lots of the performance driven folks here on BP....

My wife and I have chosen to build our family through international adoption of children with special needs, rather than try to have biological children (which might still happen someday.) 

We currently have a 4 year old son from Eastern Europe, a 7 year old daughter from South America, and a 13 year old daughter from Eastern Europe. Our 7 year old has been home for a little over 4 years, and the 4 and 13 year old (adopted at the same time, not biological siblings) are coming up on two years home. All three kids have Down syndrome, and were abandoned by their biological families because of it. 

We're also in the process of adopting a 10 year old girl from Eastern Europe who has some medical needs and a genetic condition, but not Down syndrome this time. (The gap from our 7 year old to our 13 year old was just a bit too big!) 

The adoptions have averaged around $35,000 for each child, and all the 'extra' things that go along with having children with special needs adds up as well. 

In addition to the obvious costs, we don't know how independent any of our kids will ever be, and we need to be prepared to provide for our kids for life - meaning I have Supplemental Special Needs Trusts to fund for each of the kids. 

Maybe most importantly: because many of the families who are willing to adopt children with special needs aren't as financially capable as we are (and we are by no means wealthy) our goal is to build a substantial fund to take some of that burden off of families willing to adopt these children. We have benefited from these grant organizations in the past (and we currently have a sponsorship page through Reece's Rainbow) but would love to do more to give back. 

I could talk all day about what a joy and a Blessing kids with special needs are (and this is coming from a guy who never wanted kids, in part because he was terrified of having kids "like that") and how important adoption is...and that's kind of how I know what my 'Why' is. 

It's a long story - the buyers are my tenants, who moved in a bunch of years ago wanting to buy the place. They're really nice people, but not super financially savvy. I sent them to the loan officer at the local bank I work with for investing, but they didn't have a good product for them, so I sent them to a broker I knew did USDA loans, and presto. So in a roundabout way, I'm the instigator of the whole deal. 

It's NY, so there are lawyers involved on all sides of the deal, but the broker came directly to me, and all 3 lawyers had no idea what was happening. 

I guess we'll see how it goes - thanks for the input bud.