Month: April 2021

Moving States: Part II

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I shared the background of our decision to move to KY in my last post. Here, I am going to break down the details of our moving decisions, mostly focused on the financials. My next post will be how we made housing decisions.

MOVING LOGISTICS

I was spoiled. Every single move I did between college and this past year was orchestrated and paid for by the government. NY to PA; PA to DC; DC to Richmond, VA. I didn’t touch a thing. Movers came and packed up all my things for one day. Then they came the next day and loaded a truck. Then they delivered my goods and put the boxes and furniture in the right rooms.

On our way to Richmond, VA, we decided to build our house, so we needed temporary housing. That also meant that we needed storage. The movers packed up our things and brought them to storage until I called to schedule the delivery to our house. I asked for one step extra that time – unpack all the boxes and take away the boxes and packing material. I never thought it was necessary because I liked having things clean and organized in boxes that could be pushed to a corner. Well, having them lay everything out on a flat surface (they didn’t put things away in cabinets and such) made me have my entire house unpacked and put away in a weekend. Yup. S P O I L E D!

Fast forward back to our move to KY. I no longer work for the agency that paid for relocation; I wasn’t taking a new job that would have made me eligible anyway; and Mr. ODA’s agency doesn’t pay for relocation, nor was he taking a new position.

So where do I begin?

  • We’re moving from one state to another, 500 miles.
  • We need storage for an indefinite amount of time, but something like 7-8 weeks.
  • How am I to pack up a house, while still needing things to live and managing an infant and toddler?
  • What’s the financial threshold for this adventure? Am I looking at 10k or 30k? What’s the itemized cost of each step for me to determine if it’s worth the money? Can I parse out each step?
  • How big of a storage unit do we need?
  • How much do I need to pack for our ‘homeless’ time? Oh, and it’s covering summer (with beach time) and fall temperatures.

It cost us $5,500. We did a lot ourselves.

I started by trying to find a quote at all the “pod” type places. Several of them required me to make a phone call. You know what’s really not easy to do with an infant and toddler? That’s right, spending time on the phone. My absolute most favorite is when there’s an automated message that I need to verbally respond to, while kids are screaming (whether positively or negatively) in the background, and the robot just keeps saying “I’m sorry, I didn’t get that. Let’s try again.” Eh, digressing like usual…

I went with UHaul. Their website wasn’t able to create my order, so I had to call. It kept claiming my goods would be stored only for the 500 mile trek, and kept trying to pick a delivery date one week after pick up. But once I called them, they were able to get it all squared away.

UHaul’s boxes are smaller, about half the size of the big ‘pod’ type things you’re used to seeing in driveways. We liked that if we ordered 8 boxes, based on their recommendation for our house size, but didn’t use all of them, they wouldn’t charge us for the unused boxes. Unfortunately for that plan, we ended up needing a 9th box. They were super accommodating; since their truck carries 5 boxes at a time and our order required two trips anyway, they just loaded the extra box on the second truck without charging us for the drop.

I had called the ‘all inclusive’ type movers before making this decision. Their quotes were anywhere from 12k to 35k. Well, once we heard that we were looking at about $4k for UHaul, it wasn’t worth the luxury option. The $4k included the boxes being dropped off and pickup in VA, shipping to KY, and storage for 2 months in KY. It didn’t include delivery from storage to our house in KY, but more on that shortly.

Mr. ODA had faith that I could pack up the house while raising children. 🙂 I did it! Also, with the help of many neighbors, I didn’t pay for a single box. One neighbor works for CVS and was able to bring home their boxes from deliveries, and several others dropped their Amazon or old moving boxes off for me. We purchased packing paper, bubble wrap (I actually liked the packing paper better), and packaging tape from Walmart.

Closing was the 18th, so I hired movers for the 16th. There were several questionable reviews about movers not showing, and I wanted the buffer to pivot if that came to fruition for us. It was $415 for 2 movers for 4 hours. They ended up coming with a trainee, so they had more help, but didn’t get everything packed. Our house was 2,850 square feet across two floors, with 4 bedrooms. The part that wasn’t factored in well was all the storage that was kept in our walk-in attic and all the things in the garage. They were able to get the house emptied, but didn’t do most of the garage. We had a friend come help with the odds and ends, but it was worth it to pay for the movers. They could get things out of the house a lot faster than if we had done it ourselves. Our movers weren’t great about not hitting the walls and being nice to our furniture (I walked in to one guy trying to move part of our sectional down the stairs by himself, and just let it slide down the first set of stairs – beautiful). Perhaps if we paid a bit more, we could have gotten a better team, but nothing broke and the worst was just paint scuffs.

UHaul came and picked up 5 of the finished boxes on the 16th, so that was nice to have them off the street in under 24 hours.

The plan was to deep clean the house on the 17th and close on the 18th. I hung out with friends on a nice day and didn’t get nearly enough done. We had to figure out where to sleep for that last night without most of our things, so we kept the kids’ cribs and an air mattress available. So on the morning of the 18th, we threw the rest of our things in the last UHaul box right before the lady came to pick up the last of the boxes around 8 am. I was so worried about boxes being there on closing day, but it worked out well that the truck driver said she could come first thing that morning to clear the rest of the boxes.

Then it was time to gather the things we deemed necessary (or unpackable in storage) for our two months before our new home was ready. We packed up the van with all these things, which took significantly longer than I expected it to. We had to be out of the house for the final walk through by 11 am, and by some miracle, our 5 month old daughter slept until we had to wake her up to take down her crib at 10:50! We were literally throwing things in the van while the buyers waited for us to get out of their way. I was disappointed in myself.

UHaul would store our things near the pick up or drop off location. I chose the drop off location for storage because we didn’t have a definitive date for closing on the new house. I wanted to be able to give a few days notice for taking our things out of storage versus waiting two weeks from notice to get to us, and having the possibility of delays (which were quite common during the pandemic).

There was a hiccup on the back end of this transaction though. We paid about $200 for the ‘box drop and pick up’ at our packing location. We couldn’t figure out why we only had a $1300 option on the unpacking end. When we arrived in Kentucky, we went over to talk to someone about it and see if we had more options in person. It turns out that their reason for not having the $200 option is because they don’t have the flat bed truck! Crazy. They had trailers to rent, but most carried one box at a time. They had one trailer that could carry 2 at at time, but then we also needed to rent their truck that could tow that weight. We had a couple of weeks to figure out the logistics of moving day and how long it would take to have to make so many trips back and forth to UHaul, which was 25 minutes away.

We rented the truck and 2-box trailer, and we hired a guy who used to work for that UHaul location to be our box runner. We had him pick up two boxes and drive them to our house. We had a team of friends and family here to unload the boxes into the driveway (luckily it was a beautiful 60 degree November day). Then while the guy drove back for two more boxes, our friends here took things from the driveway/garage and brought them to the right rooms inside. The plan seemed perfect, but it turns out that the process of bringing things inside was about 1/10th of the time it took for that guy to go back and get two more boxes, so there was a lot of down time. But hey, none of our friends were upset about down time! We paid the box runner for 6 hours of his time and gave him a tip. We had some issues because he didn’t fill the gas tank when he brought it back, so we got charged for that (which we were pretty unhappy about after giving him a substantial tip), but UHaul took the charges off our card for that.

For dropping 9 boxes, moving the boxes 500+ miles, and storing them for 2 months, we paid $4,420. Then add in the $420 for the movers on the packing end and $500 for the driver on the unpacking end. That was significantly lower than our 10k expectation!

Moving States: Part I

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In March 2020, as we all know, a pandemic hit. Well, our second child came into the world at the end of March, just a week after lock down. My family lives in NY, and Mr. ODA’s family lives in KY. So living in VA left us without family, with limited visits, and only seeing some neighbors while hanging out in yards and the street, but no child care or help.

We had talked about officially moving to KY while we spent the summer of 2019 there for Mr. ODA’s work assignment, but we decided it wasn’t the right time. We loved our neighborhood and town back home, and we just weren’t ready to leave. Mr. ODA was offered a promotion in DC at the same time, and that sealed the deal for us to stay in VA. The cost of living in NY near my family (Long Island), along with the crowded lifestyle, was not something we wished to pursue after experienced a ‘taste’ of the traffic and crowds when we lived by DC, which is why ‘moving near family’ meant KY.

On a walk one night in June 2020, Mr. ODA mentioned moving to KY again. He was working from home indefinitely, so there wasn’t anything holding us to VA (except my Ob and the kids’ pediatrician…. gosh it was hard for me to leave them!). At this point, isolated from most people because of the pandemic, the logic was there to make the move. Additionally, our mortgage was a 5/1 ARM that was coming due in January, so selling our house a few months before that was great timing.

LISTING OUR HOUSE

We built our house and moved in at the beginning of January 2016. For a new house, we had a lot of little projects that had to be completed before we could have people walk through it. When we sold our first house, we put a lot of our things into our neighbor’s basement as storage. This time around, we had to do the same, but without a neighbor’s basement as help.

There were the typical paint touchups, wiping baseboards, and moving of furniture. There were just several small projects that needed attended to (like replacing burnt out light bulbs and buying a comforter that fit our new bed), which took me about two weeks before we could get the pictures done for the listing.

We had one room that was the catch-all for mismatched furniture. We were told to give the room a purpose. I was able to get the exercise bike, desk, bed, and bookshelf to live harmoniously.

For pictures, we chose to keep a full-size bed in one of the bedrooms, but I quickly changed it to our daughter’s crib. We were afraid that if people saw a crib, they’d think the room was too small for a bed. So while, functionally, I needed that crib, I didn’t mind if they saw it during the walk through because they could refer back to the listing photos to see the bed there instead.

SOLD QUICKER THAN PLANNED

It’s hard to manage the expectation of how long the house will be on the market against how long to wait for listing it. We knew our new house wasn’t going to be ready until November. I was too afraid to wait until everyone went back to school, especially with all the uncertainty of what school would look like. I pushed to list mid-August (central VA goes back to school after Labor Day).

We were under contract at the end of the first weekend listed. They asked for a 3 week close, and we denied that. There was no incentive for us to move that quickly. We asked how long they’d be willing to push it, and they agreed to 30 days because they’d be living in a hotel with their family of 5. That was exactly 7 weeks between leaving our house and our new house being ready.

We decided to seize the opportunity and travel with that time. Since Mr. ODA was working remotely anyway, we could explore new places where he could work during the week from our hotel or AirBnB. I had one rule – there had to be two separate sleep areas because our 6 month old required her room to be pitch black for sleep, and messing with a baby’s sleep hurts mama! Our options are also limited because we have a dog.

Here’s how we had to unpack and repack the car each time!

Week 1 – We went to the beach! We grabbed a beautiful little AirBnB in Norfolk, two blocks from a little beach and boardwalk. I took the kids to the zoo one day, and we played at the school playground across the street a bunch.

Week 2 – We went back to our old neighborhood and imposed on some friends. Our daughter had her 6 month pediatrician appointment, and I wasn’t about to give up an opportunity to see our wonderful doctor again. Their family has kids the same age as ours, but their youngest was still sleeping in the parents’ room, which left his crib available to our youngest. As a bonus, they went on vacation for the week! As a form of payment for our time there, I painted their first floor. I love to paint, so I enjoyed having an activity. Our oldest got sick at the beginning of the week and his fever wasn’t breaking, so we ended up at the doctor 3 times with an eventual ear infection diagnosis. Him being sick delayed my progress, but I got it all done.

Week 3 – Bristol VA and TN. Mr. ODA took more time off during this week so that we could go hiking and explore the area more. It’s beautiful down there.

Week 4 to 7 – We went to KY to stay with Mr. ODA’s parents. By the time I got there, I wasn’t leaving until we moved into our new house. It was a lot to pack up the car, unload it all, keep it organized, live with the minimum for the two kids, and then pack it all back up again. I ended up cancelling two of our trips that we had planned. I kept one where we went back to our old neighborhood for Halloween. I wanted our oldest to play with his friend for the holiday, but then we didn’t even really see them. Our youngest had her flu vaccine booster that weekend too.

In hindsight, our quick decision to move was great timing. We knew there were bidding wars happening over real estate (our Realtor fielded 16 offers on a home in Richmond, VA the same weekend we listed!), but we didn’t know it was going to get as bad as it has where inventory is so low and house prices climbed. While we may have been able to get more for our house a month or so later, we wouldn’t have found many options for what we wanted in KY.

House prices in KY are about 8% higher than this time last year, and our area’s housing prices are 11% higher, according to Zillow. Example: Our neighbor was under contract to purchase his house in July. They had a new job offer come in, and they sold their house earlier this month for $55k more than they purchased it. That’s a 14% increase in less than a year.

Prepare for a Closing

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We have purchased 16 properties directly (3 personal residences) and 2 properties indirectly (partner); we’ve sold 3 properties. All houses have been mortgaged because we choose to leverage our money rather than own them outright (at least at first). This post covers the closing process in terms of clearing the loan processing.

Your loan must pass through underwriters before being approved and issued. The underwriter is evaluating your financial statements to determine risk and credit worthiness. While you’re given a pre-approval based on your credit score and report, the underwriter is verifying there are no other risk factors in the details. I’ll probably never cease to be amazed at what an underwriter focuses on – sometimes they want every account’s statement and several explanations, and sometimes they want you to confirm you don’t own a property that you never did own while ignoring the accounts you do own.

While a deadline is rarely given, you should provide the paperwork within a couple of days. The longer you take to gather the required documents, the more you jeopardize being able to close on time (the timeframe is set within the purchase agreement).

The are several documents that are going to be requested every time that you can keep filed away or know to start gathering them when you make the offer (some need to be more current than having them filed away). Inevitably, there will be follow up requests from the underwriter, so it’s best to get these files to them as quickly as possible.

  • Most recent 2 years of tax returns
    • Usually we just hand over the PDF version of our tax returns. One time, we actually had to fill out a transcript request form on the IRS page.
  • Proof of income (e.g., W-2)
  • Most recent paystub(s) (e.g., cover 30 days)
  • Color copy of drivers licenses
  • Most recent 1 or 2 bank statements
    • At the beginning of our purchasing, we had to provide a statement for every account (e.g., retirement, investments, banks). Over time, the request has become more focused on showing the statements associated with the accounts that will be used for funds as closing. I don’t know if this is related to our credit worthiness, or if it’s simply how they’ve streamlined the process. Here’s an example that shows they only requested accounts that make up our closing funds.
  • Proof of paid earnest money deposit (EMD)
    • EMD is a deposit made along with the signed contract. It’s the buyer’s showing of good faith to purchase the home. There are different expectations on the amount of the EMD. Sometimes it’s 1% of the purchase price, sometimes it’s a flat rate. We’ve just followed our agent’s lead on the amount to put on there, and it’s usually $1000 or $2000. The EMD is held by your Realtor’s office and credited to the total due at closing. If the buyer breaches the contract, the buyer may forfeit this deposit to the seller (e.g., backing out of the purchase without invoking a clause within he contract, such as the home inspection clause).
    • Proof is usually given by showing the check image along with the bank statement from the account it cleared.
  • Insurance agent contact information
    • This isn’t always known at closing, but you’ll need to provide your agent’s information before closing so that escrow can be set up. If the property won’t be escrowed, then you’ll need to provide proof of an executed policy before closing.

When investment properties are involved, you’ll need to provide documentation associated with those properties. For instance, a mortgage statement may be sufficient if you have the taxes and insurance escrowed. If you don’t have it escrowed or don’t have a mortgage, then you need to provide the current tax statement and insurance declaration. You’ll also be asked whether the property is subject to an HOA, and, if it is, you’ll provide a statement or coupon book showing the payment schedule. Neither Mr. ODA nor I are patient when it comes to illogical requests. For example, we were asked to give mortgage statements for all of our properties, as well as tax documentation and insurance policies for every property. Well, if the property is escrowed, then I don’t have tax paperwork because it’s sent to the bank, nor should I have to prove that the taxes are paid since it’s managed by the bank. I eventually provided all the tax documents though – it just took a while.

There may be large deposits or withdrawals that you’re requested to explain. For instance, I had to sign a statement that the deposit in our account was from the sale of our house. While it can be tracked with paperwork, there are many instances where the underwriter wants the details explicitly stated, versus making assumptions. For the example below, I provided the corresponding withdrawal from our main checking account.

Our first home purchase was at the same time as our wedding (we closed on our house on July 15 and got married on August 4!). A NY wedding isn’t cheap, and we were attempting to pay 20% down on our DC suburb home ($$$), so there was a lot of money movement around this time. Since my parents were helping pay for the wedding, we had large cash deposits into our account that had to be explained. We also had several investment account liquidation transactions. The underwriter had a hard time following the flow of money, and it took me several, very detailed, emails to show how each liquidation entered our checking account. We also had to provide gift letters, which stated we were gifted these sums of money and there was no expectation of paying it back (thereby creating another liability). That’s probably been the hardest closing in terms of our financial status, to date.

You may be requested to provide updated bank statements closer to the closing date, especially if there’s over a month between the initial documents given and the closing date. When you go into a closing, you’re told that it’s not a good idea to open new credit cards, make large purchases, or do anything along those lines that would affect your credit worthiness. They run a recheck of your credit before closing to ensure your credit card balances are about the same, and that there’s been no new credit opened in your name. Verification of more recent bank statements accomplishes the same.

We’ve had two closings delayed.

House 5‘s sale was about 6 weeks delayed due to the buyer’s lack of responsiveness. They didn’t respond to information requests quickly and struggled to provide the necessary documents to underwriting. Unfortunately, as the seller, our only ‘play’ is to take their EMD and walk away. If it’s bad enough, this is worth it. But it brings you back to square one. This was an off-market deal, which is enticing to see through rather than attempt to list and sell it. If we decide not to sell, we’re now looking at January or February before we had a renter; it could be even longer since we struggled in the summer to find someone for the house. Plus, the EMD doesn’t cover the lack of rent we experienced while under contract, where we expected to lose only one month of rental income, but it turned into 2.5 months. We had our Realtor (who was a dual agent, unfortunately for this matter) lean into the attorney on the buyer’s side after already being weeks beyond the contract’s closing date. By the time their delays were acknowledged, it was Christmas, which delayed closing into January, unfortunately.

Houses 12 and 13 were purchased together (and not yet discussed here). That closing was delayed a week, and it was completely the loan officer’s fault. We, the consumer, obviously get no restitution for their mishap. He didn’t order the appraisal timely and then had to put a rush on it, but it still didn’t come in on time. He created several errors in our paperwork (including the house number of one of the purchases). It got so bad that we just worked with the title agency, and she was awesome at getting all the documentation in order, even if it was a week later and Mr. ODA had to be my power of attorney!

Be prepared and be responsive. Understand that the bank is doing their due diligence and you want to be able to close on the loan and purchase that property. While there will be several requests for information, keep in mind that it’s over a short period of time and will soon be over.

April Financial Update

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This month had a lot of money movement – tax payment out, stimulus check in. As I’ve shared before, we don’t budget. But you can start seeing how we’re pretty consistent on where we spend out money. This is because we have a spending mentality that we use to make each decision, rather than giving ourselves a ceiling in each category. I believe some may see a ceiling as a definitive amount to spend (e.g., if I’ve allocated $100 for restaurants this month, and by the last week I still have $75 in that budget pot, then I’m going to go spend it). If you know your long term goals and take responsibility for your decision-making, then you don’t need to pay close attention to each dollar.

With that said, my family came to visit for a week. It was our second’s first birthday, and my dad is helping us finish our basement. With 3 more adults in the house, we spent more than typical feeding them and eating at restaurants versus cooking after spending the day working in the basement. Mr. ODA and I share the same birthday, so we splurged for a nice meal that night. We actually spent about $300 at restaurants over this last month, but thanks to our Chase credit card, we received statement credits for $188 worth of these purchases!

We have also spent more on entertainment. We went to a winery and a brewery, purchased tickets for the local horse race season, and have done other activities now that the weather is nice. The pandemic and winter had our spending lower than our usual amounts, but I expect our spending to be more than it had been in these coming months. We’ve already put together our summer bucket list for travel.

We had all the tenants pay their rent on time, except one who eventually paid. Our rental income is $12,353, and we pay our business partner about $2,100 (we collect the rent and then pay him to cover the mortgages he holds and his half of the ‘profit’ after the mortgages are deducted from rent). We had to replace the HVAC in a rental. Luckily, this rental is owned with a partner, so only half the cost will affect us. We haven’t paid the bill yet, so that will hit next month.

  • We paid about $5,972 for our regular mortgage payments. We put an additional $5,000 towards an investment property mortgage, which now has a balance of $8,665. We also put $5,000 towards one of the properties that we have with a partner, which he matched, leaving that balance at $42k.
  • Every month, $1100 is automatically invested between each of our Roth IRAs and each child’s investment accounts. Our stimulus checks that we received for the kids went directly into the kids’ UTMAs.
  • Our grocery shopping cost us $539.  
  • We spent $91 on gas.
  • $290 went towards utilities. This includes internet, cell phones, water, sewer, trash, electric, and investment property sewer charges that are billed to the owner and not the tenant. We still haven’t sought reimbursement from the builder on our electric bill, but this month’s bill was significantly less than the previous months.
  • About $1300 was spent on supplies for the basement bathroom work. We registered the kids for swim lessons, registered our son for pre-school in the Fall, did more activities with the nice weather, and I made several gift purchases (current birthdays, baby shower, next Christmas (I like buying when I find something that makes me think of a person rather than a mad dash in the Fall to buy gifts)), so that was about $400.

SUMMARY

Our net worth has increased over $123k since last month due to our investment accounts and property values increasing. Our cash balance is starting to dwindle down to what we typically carry as ‘cash.’ And our mortgage balance is decreasing more than average due to our goal of paying off two of the mortgages that we’re carrying.

House 7: Two broken leases that have worked out

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This one has been pretty easy, but we did have an interesting issue arise with the first tenant.

This is our largest house at 4 bedrooms and 1.5 bathrooms, and 1281 square feet. It’s a cape cod style house, so the upstairs has slanted ceilings, the half bath is not anything to write home about, and the HVAC struggles to work up there. The carpet on the stairs could really be replaced (but it hurts me to spend money on stairs because they’re soooo expensive compared to carpeting a room!). But the house has a huge fenced-in yard with a nice deck that’s a great selling point.

The kitchen was renovated at some point, so that’s held up well – and lets face it, who doesn’t choose baby pink knobs for their new kitchen cabinetry? But the plumbing and roof have been painful.

I’ve already told many of the stories about this house through other teaching posts, so bear with me if things sound familiar.

LOAN

The house is in Richmond, VA, and the purchase was very simple. We offered $109,000, and the seller countered with 112,500 and 2,000 in seller subsidy (i.e., closing costs), which we accepted. It was listed on June 22 at $119k, and we offered on June 25, so I’m actually surprised we got the contract agreed to so quickly.

Quick note here: after reviewing real estate contracts in NY, KY, and VA, Virginia wins. Sure there are several states that I haven’t ventured into, and this is an extremely small sample size. The paperwork is simple yet thorough, all while being in plain language. So if you’re needing a template to work off of, look up Virginia’s purchase agreement.

We settled on a 30 year conventional loan at 5.05%. We received a $200 lender credit since we closed on several properties in a short period of time. This is the house that we refinanced and received an appraisal of $168,000! We had already started with equity in the house because it appraised at $114,000 at closing.

INSURANCE

Interestingly, we couldn’t insure the house through the company that we had gone with because they have a 5 rental limit. Our agent was able to quote us through another company though, so our process appeared seamless. However, the quote was much higher than we anticipated. We went through a friend to insure it, but shortly after closing (literally a week), we were able to find an even cheaper option – that was awkward.

THE NEIGHBORHOOD

Not a category that usually gets mentioned. I discussed the neighborhood of the one house we sold already, which was because I didn’t realize it was in a higher-than-average crime area that tenants honed in on. But this neighborhood is worth mentioning.

Rentals aren’t prevalent here. In fact, many of the homes are the original owners. While working on the house when we first purchased it, the neighbor across the street approached me. He as-politely-as-possible threatened me that this is a nice neighborhood, that everyone keeps up their property, and that they don’t want any trouble. I assured him we have good standards as landlords, and we haven’t had any neighbor complaints for any of the tenants we had in our houses.

The location also comes into play for our first tenant.

TENANT #1

This house is under a property manager for 10% monthly rent.

As with most of our tenant searches, no one fits perfectly into our requirements. We offset this by a higher security deposit or having another signatory on the lease. We had two prospective tenants – one was a mother/daughter combo (an adult daughter) and both had bankruptcies in the last year; the other was a man and his family that had an eviction 7 years prior. We chose the one with an eviction. His application actually said that he “will also respect the property to the utmost.” Boy did he.

He first requested that the carpet be replaced. It was actually a reasonable request because it wasn’t the best. Here’s the carpet on the second floor. Old, bottom of the line padding; a gorgeous blue; lots of wear spots.

We decided to refinish the wood floors on the first floor because 1) he wasn’t moving in for two weeks, and 2) it would save us in the long run to put that investment into the floors instead of carpeting every few years (and risking someone completely ruining it before its useful life was up). It was $1850 and the company was able to start immediately and get it done before the tenant moved in (granted, it was the day he moved in, but it did get done). And the refinish turned out great!

He asked us for a screen door, but we said that wasn’t a necessity. He asked if he could install one himself. We agreed, as long as it didn’t prohibit our access (e.g., he can’t lock it, give us a key). This later becomes an issue because he locks it after vacating and we need it rekeyed.

This tenant had a few late rent payments and struggled with paying rent on time, but overall he was a good tenant to have. He took care of the property and let us know when he ran into issues (it’s amazing how many people don’t tell us of a problem in a timely fashion).

Just as we did on House 5, we offered this tenant the opportunity to pay rent in two installments each month. His rent was $1150 from August through February. He took the opportunity and we executed an addendum to change the rent to $600 twice a month. Again, it’s an inconvenience to us to collect two rent payments, but it theoretically should save the tenant money if they’re constantly in a position that they owe late fees (if he usually pays $1150+115=1265, then 1200 is a better position).

And then the fun happened!

I was at WORK one day, answered my work phone, and someone on the other end asked to speak to the owner of [this house’s address]. I barely used my work phone for work calls, so to receive a personal call on my work phone was very surprising. I informed her that I was the owner. She then went on to ask me questions about the tenant occupying the residence. I couldn’t answer a single question – hah! I let her know that I really didn’t know who was living there or the status of the home because I have a property manager. She was very nice and understanding, and she called my property manager.

She was with the school system. Apparently, our tenant had moved into the City public school district, but kept his kids in the adjacent county school system. It was April. I thought it was ridiculous that the school system would investigate this with 6 weeks left of school, but technically, he was in the wrong. And get this – he blamed me for it! Our nice tenant turned on us and went crazy. He claimed that he could just walk away from the house …. honestly I don’t remember his reason for it, but somehow he thought he had a case.

Virginia has a wonderful statute that says if the house is vacant for 7 days, the owner takes possession without any court interference. There’s also a statute that says we can’t collect double rent, and we need to be doing our best to rent it out if given notice. We tried to keep communication lines open with the tenant, but he was silent. We had told him that we were willing to release him from his lease obligations if we found another tenant, which we did. He was responsible for May’s rent and late fees, and we would have a new tenant move in June 1. We also informed him that he would be responsible for the leasing fee associated with finding a new tenant, which was basically considered the ‘lease break fee’ and is fairly generous ($300 instead of a standard two-months rent that’s typically seen as the fee). It kept going south from there.

On top of the rent owed, he had several lease breaches – room painting (clarification: rooms are allowed to be painted as long as it’s a neutral color or painted back to a neutral color before vacating), wall patching and painting, house cleaning, mowing, re-keying, and utilities since he turned them off. By mid-June, he still owed us $874.76. We made an arrangement with him that he’d pay a certain amount each pay check, but he failed several times. We finally threatened to take him to court, which would affect his credit score and increase the balance owed since court fees would become his responsibility. Since he had been working to rebuild his credit since his bankruptcy, we thought this would light a fire under him.

We went to court.

Court also added a 6% interest charge on the outstanding balance, which now included the $58 court fee.  

It took him over a year to pay the balance. By the time the court judgment arrived, his balance (after paying $50 here and there was $660. The court doesn’t put a timeframe or process on the judgement, but leaves it to the two parties to determine the payment schedule. He didn’t adhere to it well, but we did eventually get the whole balance paid. Mr. ODA also took this opportunity to have fun with calculating interest payments on a declining ‘principal’ balance that isn’t getting payments on a predictable schedule!

TENANTS #2 & #3

These tenants were/are much easier. The second tenant in the house had several large dogs, but we didn’t see any damage to the house. She eventually broke the lease to buy her own house in November 2020; we can’t fault someone for wanting to take advantage of low interest rates! She gave the appropriate amount of notice, but the lease was going to be broken as of 10/31, which isn’t a great time to have a rental come open. She ended up being very gracious with the situation, paid us one month of a lease break fee, and we kept her security deposit.

Right after she gave us notice, we had an old tenant reach out to us. They had moved back into town (I’ve mentioned them several times) and asked if we had a 4 bed/2 bath house available. Amazingly, we did. We showed them the house and they signed a lease within a few days.

Since turnover was fast, and I didn’t really know the status of the house, I didn’t get a chance to paint the house. All the rooms had been white except for the one room that I repainted after the first tenant had painted it lime green. The house really needs a whole paint job, and so I offered her an incentive. If she wanted to paint any of the rooms, she could knock $75 off the rent per room. So far she’s painted three rooms.

MAINTENANCE AND REPAIRS

The plumbing in this house has been horrendous. We had the tub snaked as soon as the first tenant moved in ($150). We then had issues with hot water, which required several adjustments to the water flow rates to coincide with the tankless hot water heater ($325). We had the upstairs toilet serviced ($120). Then a year later, we had to service the hot water tank again ($570). Tenants had complained that the upstairs sink drained slowly. We had attempted to snake it and fix it several times, but it never seemed to work. We finally just bit the bullet and replaced the plumbing – from the second floor to the crawl space. That work and the drywall patching cost us $1563.

Then there’s all the roof work. Shingles had flown off during a storm, so we had those replaced ($350). We also had a leak in the flat roof over the laundry room. We had a roof guy come out, and he said the roof hit its life expectancy. He replaced the pitched roof ($4135), and not the flat roof. So we’ve still had issues there that will need to be addressed.

SUMMARY

That sounds like a lot of money, but we’ve owned this house for 4 years now with our rent being double the mortgage (slightly better now too with the recent refi). When purchasing properties, any good investor is going to build maintenance and capital expenses into their numbers that determine if it’s a worthy investment. Rent cash flow wins out, and all the rest is just the cost of running our business – not to mention the $60k of appreciation we have on paper in just 4 years. It’s also worth noting that these things took up about 10 days worth of action from us over those 4 years, so most months, we just collect the rent with no other action required from us.

No property is going to be perfect, and this business relies on people, the tenants, to make the business profitable. No path will take a straight line, and being flexible to the ebbs and flows of rental property investing help make it fun too!

Amortization Schedules

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An amortization schedule is a document that is a huge spreadsheet of numbers that tells banks and their software how to apply your monthly mortgage payment. It defines the amount of each payment going to principal to pay off the loan balance, and the amount going to interest for the bank allowing you to borrow their money.

Let’s rewind. How does the bank figure out how much your monthly principal and interest payment is going to be? This is a function of several things:

  • Loan amount (purchase price minus down payment)
  • Interest rate
  • Loan term (length)

Want to see a formula for that?

  • loan amount = x
  • interest rate = y
  • loan term (months) = z

Looks like a blast doesn’t it? I saved this formula into my spreadsheet for evaluating properties so that once I fill in the purchase price, expected down payment, loan length, and the predicted rate from my lender, it will auto-populate the monthly mortgage payment amount. I then take that number and can calculate predicted cash flow based on a rent estimate.

Back to the point of the post. Loans with long terms borrow the money for a long time. Loans with high rates borrow the money more expensively. In both cases, the early stages of the amortization schedule give much more money to the bank as your fee for borrowing (interest) than they do to pay down the loan. This is because every dollar of that loan principal is being borrowed and needs paid for.

In the first payment, the entire principal amount borrowed is in that formula above, so it’s expensive to the bank to give you that money. Fast forward 15 years of a 30 year loan and you have far less outstanding principal left, so the interest charge associated with that is less. Since your total monthly mortgage payment (principal and interest, ignoring escrows) total doesn’t change, the interest applied towards a smaller balance leaves more ‘room’ to pay toward more principal. Basically, the bank gets its money out of your monthly payment first, and what is left over can go to principal pay-down.

DAILY INTEREST

To better explain the cost of borrowing each dollar over time, it’s likely easier to break it down into daily interest. An amortization schedule calculates the cost to the borrower for giving you the bank’s money on a per day basis. So while I have access to $X for the whole month, I owe the bank for every day I’m carrying that principal. Multiply by 30 and that’s what the bank charges me for interest for the month. Then, remember that the leftover is what goes to the principal pay-down.

How to calculate. Divide your annual interest rate by 365 to get your daily interest rate. Multiply that rate by the outstanding principal to get your daily interest charge. Multiply that by the days in the month (or most banks use a standard month length = 365/12) and come up with the interest the amortization schedule charges you for that month’s payment.

We mentioned the different types of amortization we’ve seen in the House 1 post. This loan calculated your monthly principal part of the payment by the exact number of days in the month so each month’s proportion of principal to interest varied up and down. This is in contrast to what most banks do that I mention above.

THEORETICAL EXAMPLES

A pretty standard rate in the last decade is 4% on a 30 year fixed mortgage. Lets say the loan amount is $100k. Plugging that into my formula above, we get a monthly payment of $477.42. Above are the first 10 payments on that loan. Only about 30% of your monthly payment is actually paying down principal at the beginning. It takes 153 payments (i.e., months) before the amount of each payment going to principal is actually more than paying interest. Total interest on the full loan in this scenario is $71,869.

Now lets look what happens when we change it to a 15 year loan. The total payment jumps to $739.69 because you are paying the principal down twice as fast. But, the first payment you make is already $406.35 worth of principal pay down. Compare it to the first loan example in the terms of daily interest. The rate is the same. The amount is the same. So the interest due for the month is the same. But because your amortization schedule knows that you’re paying the loan off much earlier and requires a larger total payment, the leftover for principal pay-down is far more substantial.

Next, look how much quicker the interest charge drops after just 10 payments compared to the first example. $320.98 vs $328.95. This is because you are paying principal down more quickly, so the outstanding balance decreases and the daily interest is then lower too. Total interest in this scenario is $33,143.

In this example, we move back to a 30 year loan, still at $100,000, but we bumped the rate to 6%. The total payment rises to nearly $600, and the principal to interest ratio of the beginning payments is quite poor. Only 17% of the payment is going to principal pay down, which means that the daily interest is high, and stays high for many months. It’s not until month 223 (18 years later!) before the amount of principal in each payment is higher than the interest payment. Total interest in this scenario is $115,838.

Side story – Mr. ODA’s parents paid off their 30 year mortgage on their residence in 12 years. As a child, Dad would explain to me their process. They printed out the amortization schedule and put it on the fridge. Each month, based on their regular cash flow of life, they would choose ‘how many months’ they wanted to pay to the loan. So they’d make their regular payment, then they’d pay the principal portion of the next 2-3 months on the amortization schedule also. They’d make some really gnarly extra payments with weird dollars and cents, but it was a calculated decision. Then they’d cross those months off the schedule, knowing that with that extra payment, the interest that was tied to that principal portion on the schedule was simply avoided/canceled, by paying that principal early. This was a powerful tool to help me understand how the loan process worked, and one that help create the foundation for me to look at time value of money, opportunity cost, guaranteed return vs potential invested return, etc. Dad missed a lot of stock market gains by accelerating a 30 year mortgage to 12 years, but very few people ever regret owning the roof over their head free and clear – with a byproduct of NO MORTGAGE PAYMENTS for the 18 years that would’ve been remaining! Now he can make more investments with that leftover cash flow of life.

Amortization schedules are one of the largest “gaps” in understanding for the typical mortgage customer. They typically get told what to pay each month and ascribe to a “set it and forget” mantra that they know in 30 years, their house will be owned free and clear. Anytime before that, why bother understanding the background math?

As you can see in the examples, a shorter loan means faster pay down with less interest overall, and a lower interest rate means a smaller payment. When looking at loan options, understanding how the math operates to get to your options can help you determine what your priorities and goals are, and how to execute them.

In our recent refinancing post we talked about analyzing when was a good time to refinance our existing loans and which ones we’d target first. Simple advice you can find on the internet is that it’s a good idea to refinance if you plan to keep the property for longer than the result of closing costs divided by monthly payment. Most times this was about 2 years for us. You can see above that the 6% example had a $123 larger monthly payment than the 4% example (30 year term). So if closing costs are $2,000, it would only take 16 months (2000/123=16) to “break even” on a refi to go from a 6% loan to a 4% loan. No brainer!

There’s another hidden benefit there too, that gets missed to make it even shorter than 16 months. Look at the principal portion of the monthly payment. On the 6% example, it’s only $99 on payment 1, but on the 4% example it’s $144. That’s another $45 benefit! You’re paying down the principal at a faster rate. Add that extra principal portion embedded within the monthly payment to the $123 lower payment savings ($123+45=$168) and you get a “break even” point of only 12 months ($2000 closing costs/$168=11.9)!

Understand how your mortgage math works so that you can speak intelligently to a lender, ask good questions, and set yourself up with the best scenario for your finances and your future.