Here's a rough copy of the excel.

I then created an excel sheet with those estimates to know (a) what to offer for land to make my numbers and (b) to hold the sub to what they estimated for me.  

If you have just one unit it's not too hard to keep track of payments, you can do it for free in Excel or Google Sheets, you just have to stay on top of it.

On paper some of these buildings had amazing metrics, excellent cash on cash returns, cap rates, etc, but when I looked at the buildings I found the neighborhoods were rough, there was poor management in place, there was lots of deferred maintenance to address.

Hi Xavien,You’ve raised an excellent and often overlooked point about the benefits of business credit, particularly for real estate investors.

Achieving excellence in anything generally requires an extreme amount of dedication and time commitment, time that could have been spent doing a thousand other things.

You bring up an excellent point about the trade-offs between second home and investment property loans.

It’s great to have you here, and it sounds like you’re in an excellent position to start your real estate investing journey.

Quote from @Marcus Bledsoe: This is an excellent thread @Jonathan Greene.

Excel spreadsheets, and not doing very well keeping up with them either!