All Forum Posts by: Tony Henderson

 Hello Reid, while I love the idea of "The house hack" I just got married last year, the wife's happy, and I'm not trying to throw a monkey wrench into my personal life....lol. Short of that sounds like I'm going to have to hustle up some side jobs for a while to speed up this process.

Welcome @Tony Henderson! If you are short on the funds necessary to cover the upfront costs associated with buying an investment property, your options are as follows: 1) start with house hacking, i.e., leverage a low down payment loan, live in the house for at least a year with roommates, and convert to full-time rental thereafter; 2) find a partner or partners to purchase a home with and split the costs/profits (you don't have to be related to someone to be on a mortgage with them; 3) the most obvious one is to save more money. 

While HELOC can be an option, you will need to have some sort of plan for how you are going to pay that loan off. That will be difficult to do in this current rate environment if you are using the funds to purchase a buy and hold property. Might be viable for a STR though, not sure on the numbers there.

@Tony Henderson When talking about private/portfolio lenders, a good number of DSCR programs they offer do not have seasoning requirements on down payment funds. If you need to meet a higher downpayment requirement, you could pull that shortfall from another source and not have to let it season before getting your deal done. If you go the conventional route your downpayment will need to be seasoned.

HELOC would definitely be an option. I've worked with people who have used HELOCs to buy rentals.

I think the reason their fees aren't adding up is because private lenders are sometimes willing to lend on deals that banks will stay away from. If you don't have super great credit or you don't have a lot of experience, a private lender will charge a premium for that. I'm not sure your situation (don't want to insult your credit!) but that's my best guess based on what you said.