@Martha Saldana-Beene I would have preferred west Madison county - Madison, Harvest, Toney due to proximity to Redstone Arsenal and other employers along with just development patterns in general but bidding up would push my budget in those areas.

The water engineer can also give a basic water and sewer gallon usage for a certain sq ft of space for a 1 bed , 2 bed etc. and what that runs.It will not be 100% accurate because your clients will have their own usage patterns and if leaks occur the bill can be thrown off.

Typically ballpark 50 basis points will buy the rate down by 1/8 (sometimes it's 40, sometimes it's 80, it would take a Ph.D to explain why there's no pattern), so 100 basis points would get your lower closing cost guy to match the lower rate guy.100 basis points on a $130k loan is about $1300. 

I think Indiana has a lot of positives but also several negatives like crime rates, schools, traffic patterns and employment opportunities.

Mint automatically tracks your electronic purchases and classifies them by type (food, gas, housing, etc).It seems like right now that you are trying to build a budget without knowing what your historical spending pattern looks like.  

I noticed that plumbers were mentioned as fitting this pattern by another poster - maybe that's because they're still getting paid too much?

I would recommend spending time completing that and then looking at posts that receive responses and trying to pattern your question in a similar way.

That's the pattern in my area.

The truly rich will use the Tax Code as aggressively as they must to avoid Nobama's tax ax.Anyone may arrange his affairs so that his taxes shall be as low aspossible; he is not bound to choose that pattern which best pays thetreasury.

Unless the beginner has a good solid business background and understands the effects of location, complimetary businesses, competitive businesses, legal issues, zoning issues, traffic patterns, RE management concerns and I could go on, anyone that just looks at a commercial deal as an income stream is very uninformed.