In spare and beautiful prose, Desmond chronicles the economic and psychological devastation of substandard housing in America and the cascading misfortunes that come with losing one’s home.

As I amass the funds needed to buy my first rental (while keeping an eye on the COVID situation), I want to house hack.As it so happens, a good friend of my girlfriend's would like to rent a spare room in my house for 3-6 months.

If it came with a spare acre or two, you could add U-haul services, build more facilities, etc.

Definitely a liability (gotta live somewhere) but if you do house hacking by renting out spare bedrooms, you can actually lower your bills every month - which is what we are currently doing. 

Stem walls are just another couple courses of blocks, and extra backfill and compaction.

Assume that there is no other cash laying around to buy the deal.Would you refinance or otherwise take out the equity (maybe you have an open ended blanket facility with spare capacity) to by the screaming hot deals or you would just pass?

It is difficult to stay compassionate or even objective when immersed in generational poverty.Cash on cash is not a measure I track, I'll have to play with it when I get some spare time.

If your panel has no spare, the 110v option could be the financially prudent choice.  

It was not disclosed to her when she bought it that it had some soil compaction issues and the foundation had some cracking.

I rent out two spare rooms in my house.