income

The Mentality from an MLM

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These days, you’re probably not immune to being asked to join or buy from a multi-level-marketing (MLM) business. Also known as network marketing, it a way for companies to sell their product through individuals who market product(s) to their sphere of influence. It gets a bad reputation with “pyramid scheme” and the like, but it’s legitimate and makes sense if you take the time to step back and learn about it instead of repeating the rhetoric you’ve heard from your parents.

Our experience with an MLM led to being open to buying rental properties, which eventually led to me quitting my job and being happy outside of a career. Here’s what I learned by keeping an open mind to an MLM, even though we make $0 from that business today.

This is my experience with our time in an MLM. Mr. ODA would probably have something different to say. 🙂

AMWAY

BACKGROUND

By now, you may have seen the documentary on LulaRoe. Our experience was with Amway, and it was different from how LulaRoe operates. Now, Amway is the black sheep of the MLM world if you go just based on name. They’re one of the original MLMs. But they sell good products in the health, beauty, and home cleaning genres. As a “consultant,” you’re called an “independent business owner” or IBO. I thought the best part was that there’s no inventory you need to hold. If you want to do “parties,” then you need products on hand. However, it’s much different than how LulaRoe would have hundreds of leggings on hand and makes direct sales out of their on-hand inventory. To earn money, you can recruit more business owners, or you can have customers who just order directly from the Amway website each month. You make money off of what your customers buy, as well as the income that your IBOs below you generate.

TEAM SUPPORT

There are multiple “teams” associated with Amway. It’s the education arm of the business. Our team met once a week, and you were expected to be there if you really wanted to be in-the-know and considered serious about growing. They helped you structure your business to take advantages of bonuses offered by Amway, and they taught a lot about having the right mentality. Their goal was to foster personal and business growth, provide mentoring and coaching, and provide the tools to grow your business through conferences and seminars.

This is where we got our start. I know it’s hard to believe, but we both were exposed to a lot of growth through this team. The things we learned through the meetings and books we read during these couple of years gave us the courage to make the big decisions we did, getting us to currently having 13 rental properties.

THE CASHFLOW QUADRANT

Our introduction to the business was started by being given Rich Dad, Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki. The book references an earlier book of his, the Cashflow Quadrant. Each quadrant has its strengths and weaknesses.
– The upper left corner of the quadrant is for those who have Employee mentality. This is someone who is trading time for money. You work an hour and earn $20. If you’re not working, you’re not earning. You’re making money in someone else’s system, and there are people over you who are making more than you (e.g., a supervisor is making more than a secretary).
– The upper right corner is for Business Owners. You own a system that works for you. You have passive income in this quadrant. You may have an employee that is generating income that you earn.
– The lower left corner is for Self-employed people. Here you’re still trading time for money, but you have control over how much you earn based on how much effort and time you put in. This is a risky area because you don’t have security and may not have an established system to rely on and project your income.
– The lower right corner is for Investing. Your money makes money for you. This can also be risky because you’re not guaranteed positive returns on your investments. If you want to make a lot of money, you need to take on more risk.

The point here, according to the team we were on, was that you want to be a business owner. You want to generate passive income so that you’re not trading time for dollars. While someone else is selling to a new customer, you’re earning a percentage of that sale while not doing anything. As you grow your Amway business, you have more and more people generating income through these sales, which you get a percentage of. The kicker is that you need to hit a certain level within your own business before you earn. We set up recurring purchases to use the products we were selling, and had customers set up with recurring orders, so that we could hit that threshold to be eligible for the passive income.

OUR MOVE FROM MLM TO REAL ESTATE

The biggest hurdle to our success was the price of the products. We aren’t someone who values a better quality to be able to justify the higher price. There are people out there that value this, but it’s not our passion. A peanut butter meal bar comes to $3.14 per bar as a customer order (as an IBO, you get the product at cost, which would be $2.82 per bar). The peanut butter granola bars we buy are $0.50 per bar. Clearly, this isn’t a marginal difference in our expenses. The products were good, but not good enough for our finances to take such a hit. I tried to focus on the beauty side of the business and held parties where I recommend products and let women try it. I had passion behind it, but I wasn’t someone who washed my face regularly and put lotion on. I could see the benefits, but I wasn’t practicing what I preached, and I lost my drive.

The next hurdle was location. Our original meeting was with our specific team within the larger team (based on your “pin level,” you had a meeting with the people who were your “downline.”). We moved down to Richmond, and our closest meeting was Fredericksburg. It wasn’t insurmountable, but it was a 40 minute drive there and back once a week. The larger team would all come together in DC every quarter for a conference. We felt like time started moving faster, and we weren’t close enough to make these our friends between conferences, and so we stopped attending the big conferences. Then we stopped attending the weekly meetings. Then we cancelled our team membership. We still maintain our Amway IBO number, since it’s just $62 per year to do that.

The thought process that we learned from their weekly teachings and reading books we probably wouldn’t have read otherwise led to our desire to generate passive income. Mr. ODA had already been interested in the concept, and then when we were talking about venturing down that path with our Realtor selling our Northern Virginia home, he really got the urge to pursue it.

When we sold our Northern Virginia home, we had about $120,000 in our bank account. About $70k of that went to the downpayment and closing costs of our new house. The remaining went to finding a rental property… or two.

REAL ESTATE, PASSIVE INCOME, AND NO JOB

Real estate is in the business quadrant, but it’s not completely passive income. Truly, the Amway business wasn’t completely passive because you still needed to have the sales (either through your purchases or customer purchases) to be eligible to earn all the passive income available to you in the business. Most months with real estate, I take the rent money, pay out our mortgages, and that’s it. Sometimes I need to make some phone calls to contractors. However, we have to do very little to maintain our business of investment properties. We can also decide that we don’t want to field the phone calls and hand off the rest our properties to a property manager for 10% of rent. If we don’t have a new property or a property to turn over, then we probably put about 100 hours per year into managing the houses.

We knew we didn’t want to be in the employee mentality for the rest of our lives. Funny, because my goal when I was in college was to work for a “big 4” accounting firm and spend 80s hour per week at work. Then I started working for the government, and my goal was to be CFO in my 30s. Then I got to the headquarters office in my late 20s and hated the environment, so I decided I wanted to be no more than a state office’s financial manager. Then we had kids, and I decided I wanted to be home with them to see all the little moments. Things sure did evolve.

I believe that the time we spent with our Amway team changed my heart. I believe that time was important for me to see a different lifestyle and a different mentality. I don’t know that I would have seen the benefits of pushing ourselves to buy more rental properties had I not seen a lifestyle of entertainment.

I started to realize it would be nice to spend time with my family while the kids were little. Who wants to wait until retirement to spend time at home, when your kids are grown and moved out of your house? Why not spend the quality time in their early years? Let’s travel more and experience more in life. Let’s have more time with the kids than the hellish hours of 5 pm to bed time.

Our cash flow each month is about $7k, just based on the rental properties. That doesn’t include expenses that come up, and every once in a while we get hit with a major system that needs replacement, but most of the charges are a couple of hundred dollars here and there. Some days, I wish I could still do what I loved to do in the transportation world, but I don’t miss the office politics and the moderately strict work schedule.

I’m happy for all the experiences that have led me to this point in life. Perhaps you can read Rich Dad, Poor Dad or Cashflow Quadrant and learn a little bit more about all the options out there. Perhaps you just didn’t know that there are opportunities out there where you’re not trading time for money, or where you’re not cushioning the pockets of an executive while you make a certain salary. Perhaps you just needed your eyes opened to the chance to make your money work for you. Or, perhaps you’ll learn that you like the stability of being an employee, and you don’t want to change. But I urge you to take a look at the options and see what works best for you, now that you’re away that there are options.

Filing Taxes

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We filed our taxes. It just takes so long, but it’s easy. This year I recorded what I did and how long it took, so I wanted to share.

I’ve shared that I record transactions all year long. Inevitably, a few things slip through a crack. So I go through everything I have on file to make sure I can support a charge I’ve recorded (e.g., receipt) and that I haven’t missed entering something in my spreadsheet (e.g., I have a receipt for work, but didn’t put it in my spreadsheet).

DC TAXES

Mr. ODA works for a DC office, but lives in KY. The paperwork information got crossed, and he ended up paying taxes to DC for a little while. Apparently DC is used to this mistake. There’s a form he filled out, attached a copy of his W2, and mailed it to DC. He received a full refund within a couple of weeks! I couldn’t believe the timing of it and how it easy it was!

STEP 1

My first step was to load all my mortgage documents for the houses that we still have mortgages on. I need to know the mortgage interest for the year and what they paid out in taxes from escrow. For some reason, it never tells me the insurance payments made on the tax document, so I need to go through my email or look at the line-by-line escrow to see when and how much was paid for insurance. I estimate the mortgage interest each year, but I don’t have the final amount until January.

STEP 2

Then I go through my email files. I try to get most of my receipts via email (e.g., Home Depot and Lowes are good about tying your credit card to your email address so I keep everything filed electronically). This took me just over 3 hours. I went through each email receipt to see if I had it recorded properly. I found 2 or 3 transactions that I had receipts for, but they weren’t recorded in my spreadsheet. I also found out that I didn’t record any of my final December transactions (i.e., stormwater utility bills and property management).

STEP 3

After I go through everything I can electronically, I move on to my paper files. We have a lot of our insurance through State Farm, and they don’t email me receipts for payment, nor can I look up previous payments made on their website. So I keep a paper copy of all the insurance documents for each house. We had a huge debacle with two of our KY houses and insurance last Fall, so I had to make sure I had all of that recorded accurately. I used to rely on the paper stormwater utility bills that I pay directly, but this year I just went into our checking account and verified the amounts that I paid against what I recorded. Since most of my transactions are kept electronically (especially with having property managers, so they’re sending me the bills they receive electronically), the paper checking was only about an hour this year. It used to be longer, but I’ve streamlined my electronic filing so mostly everything is in there.

STEP 4

After just over four hours of “prep” work, we move on to the tax software.

Mr. ODA entered our W2 information, we both pulled up all our investment account statements, and then we got into the investment properties. It’s tedious, and each year we have to remember how we matched our terminology to the system’s terminology (why can’t I keep better notes on this?!). We got into a groove and knocked out half the properties in about 80 minutes before taking a break. We focused on the 3 properties that we received one 1099-MISC for first, which involved going back and forth on some screens. Then we knocked out some of the easier houses. The next night, we finished off the rest of the houses in about an hour.

We usually call it complete at that time, but we don’t submit right away. We take a few days to see if we think of something we may have missed (whether investment property or personal finance), and then we submit. We usually owe Federal and State tax every year, so we’re never in a rush to get this done and pay. Somehow, we get a refund for Federal this year, but we still owe the State.

SUMMARY

About 6.5 hours of tax work, after being pretty on top of it all year. People ask us why we don’t use someone to do it instead of putting all that time in. It’s not that easy. If we had to send our information to an accountant, we still would have to gather all our receipts and send them over. I think it’s easier to look at my receipt and record it, rather than gather all my emails and send them to an accountant (not to mention Gmail is not a great mail system in this regard because you can’t easily add emails to new emails). Then we have to field all their questions regarding the documentation that I send, which will inevitably be frustrating to me. It’s all around cheaper and easier to do it this way.

Expense Tracking

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In January, I mentioned how I have a very detailed spreadsheet to track my expenses. I started this spreadsheet concept in 2012 when my husband and I started combining living expenses. We also moved from NY to PA to a VA apartment to a VA house in a matter of 22 months. I needed to have a way to make sure I didn’t miss any bills. I didn’t want to rely on receiving the bill itself in the mail or in my email before paying it. I chose to develop the spreadsheet based on our pay check dates, which were every 2 weeks.

Here’s my sheet, in essence. Pay no attention to the actual numbers in this screenshot, as I didn’t take the time to make sure they were made up but still proportioned to each other. The format is exactly as I use it though. I set it up at the beginning of each year.

For the entire year, I record the pay check receipt across the top of the sheet. The dates are based on the day the money hits our account. This has changed over the years, as we used to get paid on Tuesdays, but now Mr. ODA’s pay check shows up in our account on a Saturday.

The first section, which is all gray, is the rental income. I then record all the rental income near the 1st of the month. If a pay check isn’t near the first of the month, I record it for any pay check date that shows up in the first 10 days of the month. Realistically, I receive the majority of our rent on the 5th of each month, so it doesn’t make sense to record it as a projection any earlier than the 1st, and as near the 5th as I can. The ‘Net PM’ is because I don’t collect rent on our KY houses; the property manager collects rent, removes their expenses, and then we receive the net by the 10th of the following month.

The next section is the light green, which captures routine expenses on the rental properties. I record the HOA due date every 3 months, each month’s mortgage payment, the payout to our partner (I take in all the rent each month and then pay him out his half plus our half of the mortgage payment), and then the VA property manager’s expenses.

The white section covers all our personal expenses.
– The bottom two gray lines are simply an indication to me that those affect Mr. ODA’s account and not our main checking account.
– I pay our personal mortgage near the 1st of the month (some time between the 1st and the 10th, but I typically prioritize this getting paid as close to the 1st as possible).
– Our personal residence’s HOA is only due one per year, which is why there’s nothing on that line for this particular snapshot.
– Then I have all our credit card payments. For the year, I project based on the previous year’s average bill. As I get closer to the statement end period, I update the projection. If I project that a credit card bill is going to be $1000, but as we spend through the month, we had more expenses than I thought, I update the projection on the spreadsheet to reflect that. So where it said $1000, I may put $1700 to cover my savings projection.
– I project our my utilities too. I know that I have an electric and water bill each month, and I have a cell phone bill that I pay in 3-month increments to my sister-in-law for a family plan. When setting up the sheet for the year, I simply keep the same numbers from last year for the utility lines. While I can log into my account and see the details, it’s easier if I already have it laid out like this. Then I can see, “last year, for this month, my bill was only $40; why is it $70 now?” One caveat here is that I usually keep the lines on this sheet to those items that are going in or coming out of our checking accounts. The water bill can now be paid by credit card (since we moved to KY last year). Technically, I should remove that from the sheet because I track bill due dates separately from this part of the sheet, but since I’m used to tracking the water bill’s due date like this, and I like seeing how the bill changes from last year’s amount due, I’ve kept it on the list.
– I have our IRA contributions listed as well, since that’s a big chunk that comes out each month. The maximum contribution into a Roth IRA is $6,000. We have automatic contributions twice per month, so that’s actually $500 out of each ‘pay check’ grouping.
– The “other” line is for expenses that happen every year, but they aren’t worth having individual lines because there’s only one or two payments per year. As I type that, perhaps my own HOA payment could be added to the other line since it’s only paid once per year. In Virginia, we had personal property tax that would be due each year. We also have our taxes that we owe (because we purposely plan our taxes so that we don’t get a refund because that means you’ve given Uncle Sam an interest free loan). We have vehicle registration fees due. All these ‘one off’ payments are recorded on the “other” line and then I describe the expense two lines below with the asterisk.

As for the savings projection, this is probably mislabeled. It has always said ‘savings,’ but it’s really just the net of that two-week period’s income and expenses. To know if I’m in good shape (if perhaps I’m in a position where my account balance is being kept really low), I net the two ‘savings’ next to each other (so I would add the $60 and the -$19 to know that my income from that first two-week period will cover my expenses for the second two-week period also).

In practice, as I receive the income or I pay a bill, I change the text from black to gray. This tells me that it’s paid and accounted for. I also update to actuals as I go. So if I projected a credit card payment to be $150, but the actual payment was $147.34, that’s what gets put in the sheet when I make the payment. This helps me track actual amounts through the year, as well as sets myself up to create projections for the next year.

I have a separate tab in my workbook that tracks additional income for the year. For example, when I was working part time, I recorded that income on that other spreadsheet. Each time we get money from our credit card rewards, it gets recorded on my income spreadsheet. By keeping track of our additional, unplanned, income, I have the ability to identify our actual savings net for the year. I take the ‘savings’ bottom line from this spreadsheet and add all the additional income we’ve brought in from the other sheet.

While I’m not budgeting the details of our expense categories (e.g., $300 per month for groceries), I’m tracking my income and overall expenses based on bill payments. Last year, I had tracked my expenses by category to see if overspend in one area in particular. I didn’t keep up with it though because the billing cycles didn’t line up with when I’d be running my financial update, but I hope to get in a better grove this year. This set up makes me feel comfortable that I’m not missing a bill. If I get to the end of a 2-week period, and I haven’t grayed out an amount, then I know it’s time to investigate why I didn’t receive mail or an email prompting me to pay a bill. Usually what happens is I’m tracking Mr. ODA’s credit card payment and wondering how much longer he’s going to wait to pay it until the due date. 😛

I hope that was easy to follow. I don’t want to put all our exact numbers in there, but I wanted to share how I “budget.” If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to reach out!

Budgets and Overspending

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I’ve rewritten this several times over the last two months, constantly afraid of who I’d offend. Instead, I’m just going to share my raw observations and hope it makes sense to the people who need it. Plus, what’s a better time to discuss budgets than the first post of the year? I actually have quite a few posts related to budget planned. So we’ll start with why I believe budgeting leads to overspending.

I don’t like budgets in the sense of the word’s common understanding. A literal definition of the word is, “an estimate of income and expenditure for a set period of time.” In this context, I’m all for a budget. I have a detailed (over-the-top, probably unnecessary) spreadsheet that I use to manage our money. In any given two-week period, since 2012, I can tell you my projection of money-in and money-out. I make sure my expenses are covered.

ENVELOPE SYSTEM

The extreme version of budgeting (in my opinion) is the ever-popular “envelope” concept. It’s simple: you decide on your monthly spending categories, and then you put your cash* in the respective envelope to pay your bills. (*Please don’t pay for everything in cash!) When you run out of money in a given envelope, that’s it for the month. There must be a way that this works for enough people that it keeps getting touted as a great idea, but I’ve seen it fail. You’re creating a dependency on these envelopes instead of an understanding of your finances.

What happens with any leftover money in the envelope? The articles I’ve read about this system literally tell you to celebrate if you come in under budget. No. How does taking your extra money and spending it frivolously get you to your goals faster? Or it tells you to add it to next month’s envelope (e.g., if you have $50 left over in this month’s envelope for groceries, put it in next month’s envelope and now you have $350 instead of $300 to spend on groceries). How are you creating discipline and an understanding of budgeting if you can splurge next month? Now you’ve spent an extra $50 in month 2, but you need to scale back to $300 for month 3. That’s not creating a routine.

I want you to create a relationship with money.

RELATIONSHIP WITH MONEY

We don’t budget in the colloquial sense. We have a relationship with money. I make sure that my mandatory expenses are taken care of (e.g., mortgage payments, utility bills). Everything that can, goes on a credit card. When it comes to paying off the credit card every month, it goes back several steps.

My thought process is cemented in whether or not the value of an item is worth it to me. When I’m about to buy something, I take the time to think:
1) Is this item worth the price I’d pay for it?
2) Will this item serve a need (not a want)?
3) If it’s a want, will this item bring me enough happiness that I’m willing to spend this amount of money on it?

Want to know something I recently struggled with? For years, I’ve wanted a desktop tape dispenser. Years. I don’t even think about it until I’m wrapping Christmas gifts. So once a year, I have tape, but I wish I had a desktop tape dispenser. I never bought it. I thought, I can struggle through needing two hands for my tape dispensing needs for a couple of days out of the year. I thought, if I buy a desktop tape dispenser, then I need to buy a different kid of tape than I already have on hand. Every year, I just dealt with it because it wasn’t worth the cost to me to invest in something that would make things marginally easier for me for a few days of the year. This year, after wrapping more than half the gifts, I decided enough was enough. I purchased 6 rolls of tape for 9.99 and a dispenser for 4.22. I’ve been wrapping gifts outside of my parents’ house (where there were tape dispensers) for more than 15 years. I’ve struggled with the decision to purchase a dispenser every single year, and it finally got to the tipping point this year. All that thought process, over all those years, to spend less than $15.

That’s my thought process for every non-routine purchase. Instead of putting cash in an envelope marked “something for me” each month, I’ve trained myself to manage our money from the purchase point instead of an envelope full of cash that I mindlessly spend down. I can make an informed decision on whether or not I need or want something. I’m taking the time to decide whether this is going to bring me long-term happiness, short-term happiness, and whether the cost of the item is worth it. Had that tape dispenser been $15, plus new rolls of tape for $10, I probably wouldn’t have bought it. Because at that point, I’d be happier with a new shirt or new pants for $25. So I would have decided that my $25 is more valuable to me than to spend it on tape. That doesn’t necessarily mean that I go out and buy a shirt arbitrarily; it just means that I’ve decided that the value of that money is worth more to more towards something else than this item I’m currently contemplating.

OVERSPENDING

I see it over and over: people who budget seem to be the ones buying things they don’t really need. Instead of changing your mentality to be whether a purchase is necessary or is worth the price, the decision becomes “I have $300 left over, what can I do with it?” I see people have their sights on a product that they want. They build it up in their mind that it becomes unattainable, so when the extra money is there, they splurge on it. But did they ever step back and ask if it was really necessary or if their money could be put to better use in their overall wellbeing?

There’s a time and place for splurges. I understand that buying something you want makes you happy, in that moment. What if you thought: does my happiness in buying this gaming console outweigh the anxiety and frustration that I can’t pay my bills in a couple of weeks?

If you struggle to pay your rent month-to-month, then a large influx of money should be earmarked for future bills, not to splurge over and over again. An envelope system creates a reward-driven desire to your spending. The goal should be a more comfortable lifestyle where you’ve set yourself up for success instead of a groundhog-day-struggle to make ends meet.

There have been several instances that I’ve seen in the last couple of months, but the one that really has been weighing on me happened in October when I was working.

I was working at the racetrack. It’s temporary work – working during the race meets and possibly during their horse sales. The Fall meet was 17 days. Depending on where you’re working, you can make some really good money. I happened to be placed in one of those locations, and next to me was a young girl. She complained of having to work two jobs and not getting a day off all month because she was working two jobs. She also shared that she struggles to “make a decent living,” and that she borrowed money from a friend to be able to pay rent on October 1.

The first day, we made over $400 in tips. The second day, she asked how we celebrated making that amount. I bought the Hatch sound machine. I’m going to assume that most of our readers have no idea what that is, but it’s a sound machine and a light that can be programmed for different needs (for instance, I wanted it to give our toddler the signal that it was OK to get out of bed). It’s $60. I had already looked into several options, and I had already determined that I was in a place in life where it was worth it to me to spend the money on the original than to attempt to buy a knock-off that doesn’t work great for $40. Personally, I was going to buy this thing regardless of what I made while working, but I used that as my example on what I splurged on with our unexpected earnings. She shared that she took her boyfriend out for a steak dinner. One celebration isn’t going to break the bank, but it became a routine. It wasn’t until the middle of the month that she said she had paid her friend back for helping her pay rent. That $150 you spent on one meal could have been prioritized to keeping a roof over your head, or being a good friend and paying your debt.

So often, I see someone else blamed for one person’s mistakes. It’s the greedy landlord’s fault that you need to pay rent. It’s the government’s fault for not increasing minimum wage. What if you stepped back and looked at your decision making? Did you buy the new gaming console and then struggle to pay rent on the first of the next month? Did you go to Costa Rica and then struggle to pay rent on the first of the next month? Did you buy that new gaming console, and not add to your savings for future planning? The televisions in our house aren’t huge, but they work. I don’t have a need to replace a working television simply so that I can have the newest technology and the biggest screen.

If you don’t create a relationship with money and an understanding of how to make informed decisions, you may end up with unnecessary expenses with money that could have been more productive. It’s time that you step back and look at your entire spending picture to know whether you’re truly budgeting and learning, or you’re mindlessly spending money because you’ve accepted that’s the cost.

Hear more from Mrs. ODA

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Back in May, I was a guest on Maggie Germano’s Podcast, “The Money Circle.” I shared some of our background and how we started investing in real estate. We brushed on topics like establishing an LLC, tax advantages, and how you don’t need to start big to just get started. It was a brand new experience for me, but I’m passionate about our real estate experiences, and I loved being able to share. I hope you’ll check it out!

The 4% rule – How does Real Estate Play In?

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The common goal in the FI/RE (Financial Independence, Retire Early) community is to reach a point where your net worth is 25x your annual spending, meaning your expenses are 4% of your net worth. This is an extreme oversimplification of things because of the number of variables associated with where your net worth might be, and how to access it. For example, retirement accounts have requirements to be met before drawing funds; while you may have hit the 4% expense to net worth ratio, it may not mean that you have that money liquid to cover your spending.

When the ODAs started down the path of FI/RE, we did it with a real estate rental portfolio. This path of net worth growth really doesn’t fit the traditional mold. It provides regular cash flow, rather than an account with a balance that’s drawn down. 

As mentioned in previous posts, there are numerous ways to make money in real estate. The path we have taken is probably one of the simplest and most repeatable for anyone. We own a portfolio of single family rental houses, most of which were bought straight from the MLS. These basic properties are in basic neighborhoods with regular tenants. Nothing special. We acquired these properties by focusing on the 1% rule in real estate – try to secure 1% of the property’s purchase price in monthly rent. Another oversimplification of how things really go, but if we were able to find a $100k property that rents for $1,000 a month, we know we’re going to make money long term. 

For these properties, we typically put 20%-25% down and finance the rest through a conventional mortgage. We find a tenant, and then the 4 ways to make money in real estate go to work for us: appreciation, tenant mortgage pay-down, tax advantages, and most importantly for our situation and FI/RE – cash flow. 

I want to talk about how we can reach a FI/RE number through real estate cash flow differently and more quickly than using traditional stock market investing. 

The $100k house had a 20% down payment and mortgage rate at 5% interest, which brings the monthly principal and interest payment to $429. Add another $121 for taxes and insurance (using round numbers here!), $100 for maintenance and capital expenditures savings, and $100 for a property manager; this comes to $750 worth of monthly expenses. At $1,000 per month of income, you have $250 per month of cash flow in your pocket. $250 per month equates to $3,000 per year of cash flow. With the $20,000 down payment and about $5K in closing costs, it means that our $25k investment nets us $3k per year in cash flow. 

Circling back to the 4% rule for stock market investments, $3k in cash flow requires a savings of $75k. But we only had to invest $25k! We’re banking on the monthly cash flow, rather than a “stagnant” savings.

We took that math and ran with it. Our rental portfolio has 12 houses in it. While we’ve shown in prior posts that each house’s numbers aren’t as clean and simple as this example (some better, some worse), if we take that $3k annually and multiply by the 12 properties, we have $36k in annual cashflow for only $300k invested. 

What would you rather need to produce $36k income – $300k or $900k?

Can you scale a rental portfolio to reach enough annual cashflow such that you can live off the cash flow? 

Rental property investing is not completely passive. We have tenants to manage, properties to maintain, property managers to manage, income and expenses to track for taxes, lending efficiencies to explore, and the list goes on. But if you’re willing to put in a little work to reach financial independence (the FI part), you can do it substantially faster by finding strong properties to provide significant cash flow than if you were to take the totally passive route of simple stock market (index fund) investing. 

Note, there’s nothing wrong with that – we have a substantial position in the stock market due to the tax free growth benefits of retirement accounts. The power of real estate investing saw our net worth grow faster than we’d have ever dreamed since we bought our first rental in 2016. The proof is in the pudding and we advocate to anyone to just get started!

2020’s Expenses and Activity

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When people talk about having rental properties, usually the first thing we hear is, “I don’t want to hear about a clogged toilet at midnight.” Does your toilet clog at midnight? No. So why do people think that tenants have issues that you wouldn’t typically see in your own house? A tenant can’t expect service faster than you’d get on your own property.

Even when there’s a month that requires a lot of our attention to be on rental properties, it’s still always worth the income/expense ratio. 2020 was a year of big expenses. However, I kept the perspective that we had several properties that we didn’t even hear from, and this was just one year of 4 so far.

Here’s a look back at what happened with our rental properties in 2020.

House #7 required a roof replacement. We have dealt with leaks since we purchased the house, and the time finally came that the replacement was more cost effective. This house also required HVAC repairs and plumbing replacement. Since we purchased the house, we had issues with the upstairs bathroom sink not draining properly. After several attempts to unclog it, our plumber finally made the call – it wasn’t a matter of cleaning a clog, it was time to replace corroded copper pipes… from the second floor to the crawl space. And so we did that. We then had to pay someone else to repair the drywall. All together, this house cost us $7,600. However, about $4k of that was the roof, which has to be depreciated over 27.5 years, so we only claim about $75 of that cost this year.

House #1’s roof has also troubled us from the start, but it’s under HOA control. We had a leak that was bad enough to require the HOA’s attention. It was a multi-week process to get them to even acknowledge me, and I have no intention to ever own a townhome again. I like having more control over my property than being in a position to hound an HOA to address a water-related issue as I watch more rain in the forecast. In the end, they repaired it, but we’re responsible for the drywall repair, which was $76.

House #6 required the main sewer line from the street to the house to be replaced, which was $4k including the scoping trip to put a camera in the pipe and see how deteriorated it was.

We had quite a few HVAC issues this year, after only having 1 issue on all our houses (well 2, but that second one was someone driving over our unit and insurance covered it). We had House #3 require a new fan, which was $635. House #9 had an entire HVAC replacement at $5k, depreciated 27.5 years. House #12 required HVAC work at $500.

We had to replace a dishwasher, stove, washing machine, and refrigerator among the properties as well. These were the major purchases and don’t account for several smaller plumber and electrician trips that were needed among the properties.

On the positive side of things, we paid off one loan, paid $23,500 paid towards another, and refinanced a property (reducing our monthly payment by $104).

Of 12 properties, we had to turnover 3. Turnover is the most time consuming to us personally because it requires our attention to touch up paint, fix things, order appliances, and coordinate any other maintenance issues. Then we need to handle listing the property and showing it when we don’t have a property manager, which was the case for 2 of our properties.

In March, we had the tenant at House #11 request a renewal of their lease. A couple of weeks after signing the renewal, they requested to be released from the lease because they were moving to another state. We worked with them, for a fee, to be released from the lease, and they vacated the house as of April 30. I had to repaint, clean the bathrooms and kitchen, fix a few things, and clean the carpet (which was only a year old at this point). We listed the house, had several inquiries, and had it rented on May 7.

In September, we had the tenant at House #7 request to be released from her lease because she was buying a house to take advantage of low interest rates. The Fall isn’t a good time to be listed a house for rent, but it’s hard to not help someone help themselves like that! We agreed to release her from the lease for 2 months worth of rent. Shortly after that agreement, an old tenant of ours reached out asking if we had something coming available in October or November, and this house fit her request perfectly. I met her to show her the house and had a November 1st lease signed the next week. We asked the new tenant if she could move out before October 31st, and we would refund her for the days she left early. We spent two days touching up paint, fixing an old water leak patch (the roof had since been replaced by the drywall work in the laundry room hadn’t been addressed), and cleaning the house. Our paint touch up was far from perfect, but we didn’t have time to repaint the whole house. I offered the new tenant an incentive of $50 per room and $25 per paint can if she wanted to paint herself, and she actually did 3 rooms so far.

The final house that had turnover is managed by a property manager. Our house was the first the tenants had rented, and they didn’t quite understand all the details of having to give notice that they were leaving. We worked with them while they went back and forth deciding if they wanted to renew or leave. While our lease stipulates that we require 60 days notice if they plan to leave at the end of the lease, we wouldn’t typically post the house for rent more than 3 weeks out. They eventually decided they wanted to leave the house, but then at the last minute asked for more time. We had a lease lined up for two weeks after they were going to vacate, so we were able to give them an extra 10 days in the house. Once they left, we had the carpet and house professional cleaned, and I touched up some paint. The property manager handled the listing, showing, and background checks. The new tenants haven’t asked for anything since they moved in back in July.

We were not heavily impacted by the pandemic. We hadn’t realized it until the Spring, but nearly all our tenants work in health care, which is just an interesting coincidence. During 2020, we only had one tenant that we had to constantly keep up with regarding her employment and ability to pay rent. She didn’t always pay on time, but we would have all the month’s rent before the end of the month each time. Then we had a tenant here or there that needed another week or two to pay rent in full, which we had no problem allowing. We didn’t collect any late fees in 2020.

While a year of several big expenses can be overwhelming, it’s helpful to know that this has not been our norm and the issues were centralized to a few houses. It also helps that 5 of our houses have long term renters (renewed more than once). Having a tenant renew their lease saves us time and money.

Doing Your Own Taxes: Set Yourself Up for Success

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I manage all the financials for my family. Mr. ODA makes the maneuvers, and I record them. Excel is where our organization lives and dies. Sure, I have a degree in Finance and Information Technology Management (i.e., Excel), but it doesn’t need to be complicated or difficult to make tax prep easy for you.

This level of organization allows us to do our own taxes. After the first year of purchasing rental properties, we thought we’d have to hire someone to do our taxes because it would be complicated. It’s not any different than filing your own personal taxes. The software systems available online walk you through the entire process. Each property’s income and expenses have to be entered separately, which is time consuming if you have several properties, but it isn’t difficult.

The most important thing to be ready for your taxes is to make it a whole year activity. If you record income and expenses as they occur, it’s less of a hurdle when the year is over. By recording the activity all year, it then becomes a verification process when the year is over, thereby reducing the possibility of missing something or recording something wrong.

At the beginning of each year, I create a projection of income and expenses, which helps Mr. ODA adjust his W2 tax bracket throughout the year so that we break as close to even or owe very little when it comes to tax filing. Let me dive into that aside quickly.

Go back to Mr. ODA’s tax posts:
– TAXES! Part 1 – What are Marginal Tax Brackets?
– TAXES! Part 2 – Is Your Bonus at Work “Really” taxed more?

Taxes Part 2 is what I’m particularly referring to, but you may need the lesson in Part 1 to know what that means. There are IRS penalties if you fail to pay your proper estimated tax (when you don’t pay enough taxes due for the year with your quarterly estimated tax payments, or through withholding, when required). Title 26 of the United States Code covers the penalties. Essentially, the IRS is saying, “You have to estimate your annual taxes owed, and you’re not allowed to only pay us taxes on April 15th every year, but you have to pay the taxes over the course of the year.” People get excited to receive a refund from their taxes, but really that’s just an interest-free loan you’ve given the government. Perhaps some people do need that forced savings, but wouldn’t it be nicer to have that extra money in your pocket throughout the year?

Back to the point…

I create a new workbook every year with each house having its own spreadsheet. Schedule E is going to require you to put your income and expenses, per property, not as a whole, so it’s important to have expenses assigned to a particular house. I set up each spreadsheet in an Excel workbook to identify all known costs for the coming year. Not all of these apply, but these are typically the categories of my known costs for each year: property management, HOA, utilities (City of Richmond bills the owner (not tenant) for sewer fees), property taxes, insurance, annual mortgage interest, cost basis depreciation, and prepaid points depreciation. There’s also a chance that you’re carrying appliance depreciation costs (meaning, the purchase of a washer, dryer, refrigerator, etc. aren’t recorded as an actual expense in the year purchased, but are required to be depreciated over its useful life).

As the year goes on, I record any mileage (record the actual miles along with the mileage cost) and maintenance costs. The IRS posts the standard mileage rate for each year here. If a roundtrip to a rental property is 40 miles, then the expense is calculated as 40 miles multiplied by the standard mileage rate, which is $0.56 for 2021. I’ve learned over the years that the software systems just request your miles and do the calculation for you (which is smart and safer on the calculation side), but we want to know what the calculation is going to be, so I enter it as $22.40 in my spreadsheet.

You’ll be expected to input the days your property was vacant, so record that once it’s known.

Each spreadsheet is linked to a master sheet at the beginning of the workbook that shows the net income and expenses for each property. The difference of these amounts are what Mr. ODA uses to adjust his W4 deductions.

I personally assign costs month by month so I can keep track of them, but it doesn’t even need to be that fancy. A running list of these expenses are enough.

The categories are based on what’s going to be requested through Schedule E.

Then in January/February of the following year, I go through my filing cabinet and my email to ensure I’ve captured all of the expenses that I have receipts for, and vice versa to ensure that if I’ve recorded an expense, I have a receipt for it. Having already captured the expenses throughout the year serves as ‘checks and balances’ and doesn’t make the task feel too overwhelming.