If you’re close to $150,000 in AGI, a few ways you can bring that down AGI is by maxing out a 401k traditional ($23k for 2024 tax year), maxing out your HSA ($4,150 for 2024 tax year), and if you have any capital losses from stocks (up to $3k per year), I would encourage you to have great bookkeeping to ensure you’re capturing all of your deductions appropriately on your rental property.

And of course they have no money so going after them is like going after a dead beat tenant..

this is good.2. saving up a bunch of cash to "retire" as quickly as possible, putting 100% of it in stocks, and then obsessing about the safe withdrawal rate for the rest of time. 

I'm absolutely horrified of bees/wasps and would gladly pay someone to get rid of it even when it's an old dead nest.

The stock market is, of course, up and down.

Of course the co-signer should be significantly stronger in ALL areas as compared to the applicant...usually this is a parent or relative, and they should be well established, with ownership of real estate for years; long and stable employment; no, or very distant, criminal and traffic court records; well funded SAVINGS/IRA's or stock market accounts.

This deal that you mentioned sounds at first blush that it's dead in the water because of the large deposit.

Unfortunately, at the time, and for the years that followed, I was preoccupied with the notion that stocks were the superior investment vehicle.

Affordability is about 1:3So yeah on the surface it looks like a big difference, but there's a lot of things not controlled for in the stats- There were a crazy amount of houses built in the years just after the war, so housing stock was easy to come by everywhere;- Homes had nowhere near the kind of features they have now - 2 car garages, dishwashers, OTC microwaves, W/D hookups, high efficiency windows, central heat & air conditioning, etc - all those doodads and niceties drive up the cost of housing;- Fewer mortgages were 30 year, so homeowners had to pay (relatively) higher monthly payments;- Rentals were almost exclusively apartments, so there was more supply for buyers;ETCI think these things tend to be more stories that make for good press but aren't really that grounded in reality overall.

Her half-siblings, who felt she didn’t deserve the property, were dead set against the sale and refused to cooperate.