All Forum Posts by: Weina Shi

Hi Weina,

In our area you may want to reach out to Bedford Cost Segregation, they're about 40 min north of Boston. I have had a few meetings with their leadership about cost seg and I know they have done reports for smaller assets like yours.

Kyle

@Weina Shi Great question, but I dont think there is a straight forward answer. For example, how long do you own it? What is the extent of your capital improvements? 

How many units are you considering the cost seg for?

@Weina Shi Yes, RUBS is the way to go if you want to avoid hardware costs. Funny, Sant, the other commenter so far, and I were just having this conversation in another thread. I used to implement RUBS in a 6 unit. Here was my experience:

 For the most part it worked well but the reason I was swayed away and looked into submetering was because it increased the number of calls/complaints I would get from my tenants. I would get calls and emails over the weekend from one tenant letting me know the other tenants had friends staying the weekend with them and they wanted me to know because they did not want to be assessed the additional water usage. It was basically a "point the finger at other tenants for high usage each and every month" To their benefit in many ways I agreed with them as I wouldn't want to pay for other people who weren't responsible for water usage. It didn't cost me anything but I got tired of the complaints. Clearly the ultimatum is RUBS is free to implement and only costs a monthly fee to pay a company to do it for you or your own labor to do it each month vs. pay for a larger up front cost to install meters (that is not always cheap) and a monthly monitoring cost.

Weina,

Your SSN and EIN are two separate things and I would highly recommend that you keep them that way.

Yes - Get an EIN for the LLC and use that in all communications with the IRS, Contractors, Tenants, Service Providers, etc.

NO - Do NOT give your SSN to anyone that does not have 'right' to it (e.g. Bank when opening account). When you do provide it (e.g. applying for loan in your own name), make sure they are a reputable company.

Unfortunately identity theft is a real thing and can really screw up your life for year and years once it happens.

Oren