All Forum Posts by: Tracy Schiller

Would anyone currently using YNAB for their Rental Property budget be willing to share their setup?  Here's what I'm thinking but I'm just having some trouble setting up the whole thing.

We have 2 rental properties, so I set up a category group for each property, each with the same budget subcategories:

Legal & Professional Fees (Includes things like inspections and appraisals, as well as any wire transfer fees at closing)
Advertising & Marketing
Property Management
Utilities
Mortgage Payments
Property Taxes
Insurance
Repairs & Maintenance
Vacancy & Collections
CAPEX
Security Deposits (Tied to a separate savings account as required by state law)

Then I have a General Category group with the following subcategories:
Travel
Software Subscriptions (Includes things like YNAB any any management software I use)
Printing & Office expenses (basically just printing, but I guess if I needed to buy supplies...
Legal & Professional fees (Such as my tax accountant and any legal consulting I may need)

Am I missing anything that you can see? I'm not going to take a home office deduction (frankly I don't currently have a stationary home; we work from the road), but how do you handle things like your mobile phone bill, Internet expenses, etc. that you use for business. I don't have dedicated lines for these types of things.

Any help and/or suggestions would be awesome!

We are looking to purchase our first rental property. We have an enormous amount of equity ($600k+) in our primary home, and we currently have a 15yr mortgage with an interest rate of 1.99%. We don't want to do a cash out refi and lose that interest rate, so we are thinking of a HELOC.

Here are some questions/situational facts:

• Do most banks generally let you do a HELOC for investment purposes, or would we have to go with an investor-specific lender?
• We are currently traveling (and will be for the next 6 months) so we can't really go with a small local bank or credit union because we need to be able to do it all online, including closing.
• Another option for us would be to cash out some of our retirement savings. We are old enough to do that without penalties, but that may have some unwanted tax implications due to our current W-2 income.
• What's going to be the best way to analyze our options and make a decision, and if it IS to get a HELOC, are there any recommendations?

We have identified the area we want to invest in, and have found a local Realtor and Lender for the purchase, and are very busy learning how to analyze deals, but we figured we'd better get this figured out now so that we will be ready to go when we find the deal we want to pursue.

Thanks!