Madison MoneySports - Personal Finance Thread

[WRXtranceformed]

I'll say it once again, residential real estate investing is not worth the time, investment funds, energy or effort unless you are a slum lord / own a trailer park or you have the capital to front for commercial condo buildings.  Commercial real estate >>>> all without question but that also takes a lot of capital and knowledge.

I'm diving into it this year, with the expectation that I'll hire a property manager and that its easier to build equity rather than more savings.  It may take some work to find a good one that will look after the place, though.  I also dont expect to quit my day job.

There seems to be a lot of info and support here - https://www.biggerpockets.com/ - I've been reading there a lot.  One of my goals is that it will generate passive income once I'm done with the rat race.

Have fun man.  Just make sure you read both sides of the coin before you dump too much money and energy into it.  I used to build houses for people who rented them out and have a lot of friends that have tried to do it to build pAsSiVe InCoMe because they got roped in by the glamour of being a landlord.  Every single one of them has horror stories and most of them have cut bait and gotten out of that market.  Truly the best thing about that business is that you can use it to shelter your income from the tax man.

My favorite was the guy who bought a $450,000 townhouse that we built in Chantilly.  He was a high ranking Navy officer and gone most of the time so he hired a company to keep it filled with renters and manage the property.  As it turned out, the second renters he got were meth addicts and squatted.  They finally got chased out of there somehow, I guess by the police.  I was called in to do an initial assessment for our company's warranty service department (who obviously covered none of it).  The entire place smelled like feces, they had pooped in every corner of every room.  Every single door in the house was kicked in and broken.  When the plumbers came in, they found meth pipes and drugs in the upstairs plumbing that they had tried to flush when the cops came.  Unfortunately those broke the pipes and it basically rained shit water down through the entire house.  Nearly every bit of drywall, insulation and all of the flooring had to be replaced.  Maybe that guy got lucky and his homeowner's insurance covered some of that.  Either way it was a massive sunk cost and loss of rental income for a long time while they had to assess, remediate (from the meth fumes but also from the black mold had already started to grow by the time i got there) and rebuild.

That's not exactly what I call a relaxing retirement income stream