I hope I'm not coming off as egotistical, but My wife wife and I are raising two small kids with a single income and zero debt outside of our mortgage.

I also have some credit card debt.

Also stay out of (or pay off your) debt.

I have a CPA do all my tax work but I have been reading to try and understand a bit more so I can follow what he is doing.My question is about how I calculate depreciation as simply as possible.Property Value 100,000Basis 80,000 Land 20,000 - I divide the basis by 27.5 each year and that should give me (80,000\27.5) 2,909 that I can deduct off my pre-tax cash flow from the property.Just using an example, after all expenses and debt payments the property was to produce a pre-tax cash flow of 2000.

Fully understanding that if this were a bird dog, step 1 would be eliminated and if this were a wholesaler step 1 would be needed.

I'm a securitized mortage analyst with a focus in analyzing pools of securitized mortages - if you're guessing subprime debt you are right on the money.

The reason was you are still libel for any debt.

We were thinking about starting with extending the drain pipes further from the house and installing a new sump ($231 for a good quality new pump on Amazon) to see how much that eliminated the water.

You pull the 80k out of the house, which then covers the debt service on this money.

But getting into matters where people need to improve credit, earn target amounts as taxable income or paying off debts requires an indepth knowledge of these matters.