I know that the city has been cutting back on multi-family homes, but this clearly is a duplex.

No keys ever get transferred until all funds have cleared or they provide a bank certified check.

So, to put this in words and be clear, if I have $100 in cash flow using the 50% rule, theoretically I can do whatever I want with that cash as long as whatever part of the 50% of expenses I don't use is saved for times of higher expenses?

He is currently asking 140,000 for all, but has made it clear he will take less.

A good contract should make that clear.

My plan is to offer these lots as a purchase option (1 year from now) since i dont not have clear title yet.

The IRS is pretty clear that you cannot rent from yourself or your spouse and I think a judge would look at the asset as clearly a liability protection scheme (aka not running as a legit business), pierce the corporate veil, and not provide you any protection.It's fun to start LLCs, but it's also expensive and time consuming to maintain properly (separate accounts, K-1s, 1099s, accountants...) just to provide liability insurance.

I do not have enough cash on hand to buy free and clear and I am very concerned about the finance world.Plus, as you indicate, the 'deals' just are not quite right.

I think the banks would rather get this cleared up sooner than later.

The FDIC prefers to move in and take over at 5pm on Fridays to give them the weekend to clear things up and so people can't panic as much-that shows just how bad things were for WaMu if they couldn't wait 24 hours.On a WaMu side note-we just got a new client at my firm in the past month, her father passed away and surprisingly left her 2.5 million. 750k of that was in WaMu CD's.