new tenant

August Financial Update

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I’m tired is an understatement. The rentals have hit the point where they’ve worn me out. I can’t put my finger on it, but I’m over them. Tenants have hit an oddly needy phase where they feel the need to walk me (and my property manager) through all their days and issues instead of keeping it a professional relationship. There’s been slightly more turnover than we usually see (yet they’re from houses that had been occupied for several years, so I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that eventually they need to move on). On the personal front, I feel like I’m juggling a lot of thoughts even though I don’t feel like it’s too much. There’s just a lot of brain power going towards decisions and organization.

PERSONAL

Kids started school a week ago. We’re still establishing a routine, but sports are forcing the schedule more than anything. Everyone seems happy though.

I had to pay the final payment for the windows this past month. It was delayed as they had to replace several windows and sashes that were damaged. I appreciated they didn’t ask for final payment while waiting for things to be right. That increased our credit balances by $6k. Then we bought a couch. I’d say it was on a whim, but it was something being considered for months. We walked into Costco to see a sectional we liked, but as we started thinking about it, the sectional really wouldn’t work the way we want in the space. We walked around Ashley, picked an option, thought about it for a few days, and then went back to purchase it. We were able to get it for a couple of hundred less than anticipated based on final price, and it was delivered at the end of that week.

I’m volunteering on the PTA at my kids’ school. I walked in a room and ended up VP for that, but so far it’s been great. We’ve been busy; everyone wants to help, so it’s encouraging. I’m on 3 HOA boards, one of which meets monthly and has a project that we’re trying to wrap up. I’m still working a few hours; much less than I had been, but it’s still something that I need to give attention to. Gymnastics, soccer, baseball. The littlest one starts school in September. Not too much, but enough to feel it. I’m also driving the kids to school every morning, which wasn’t the plan and wasn’t how the last two years went. However, their bus stop is an hour before school starts, and I already feel like they need to wake up too early, so I committed to driving. Things are shaking out and it’s getting easier though.

I am close to finishing a bathroom renovation we started several weeks ago. It took me two months to get a mirror for over the sink. And then Mr. ODA cut and nailed in a trim piece that I need to caulk and paint still. There are a few paint touch ups I’ve been waiting to do since I knew that trim piece would need painted, so that’s on my radar. I changed how the kids’ backpacks, coats, and school things would be managed this year. I removed them from the mud room (since it’s small) and made a wall in the dining room a place for all those things to live. It’s working better at this point now that we’re less crowded. I was hoping that walking past the kitchen table with water bottles on it would help them remember water bottles, but I’m not seeing that success rate yet.

RENTALS

I don’t even know where to begin here. We have a DV case at one house, mice at two houses, had to remove someone from a lease due to a divorce, had to turnover a house with an entitled previous tenant and a less than stellar pool of candidates (but it’s rented), an HVAC call that was completely unnecessary but I did it to appease a tenant, another tenant complaining that her washer smells (that’s not on me), and another house where the tenant complained that the sink faucet base is peeling (again, not doing anything with that). I think my expectations are just off. I’m used to some time where the houses run on autopilot, but they’re taking a lot more of my time these days, even if it’s just managing who still owes rent.

This month, everyone paid rent “on time.” Actually, one was late by a day, and I did have to follow up, but she apologized and said she fell asleep before her check cleared and had just woken up. There’s one house that pays twice per month, and they’re going to be two days late on the rent that’s owed this week.

Actually, quick aside. Since when do checks clear in the middle of the day? I’ve never experienced this. On my pay day, the pay is sitting in my account after 6 am that day. Someone is claiming that her check clears at 1:00 pm. Someone else was saying they needed to wait until 12:30 for their check to hit their account. How is that happening? I pay people via Gusto at work and I can’t set a payment TIME, just a date.

NET WORTH

It’s crazy that this balance is $100k higher than last month. I updated the market values of the houses. None of them increased, but a few decreased. I’m not surprised knowing that market prices have cooled.

These posts are specifically to talk about the actual money aspect of life. It’s not meant to do anything except share regular life decision making, establish a constant reminder that the small decisions build your wealth, and remove the stigma of talking about money (while also not perpetuating the thought that it’s cool to complain about being broke all the time). So while I highlight “net worth,” I felt compelled to point out that wealth isn’t that number. Wealth is the freedom we’ve established for ourselves. We are available to take the kids to school and pick them up without a rushed/stressed demeanor. We are able to attend all the school events. We can drop everything and be at the school in 10 minutes if a kid needs us, without checking in with a boss or asking for time off. We can take trips during the week (when school isn’t in session). We can provide activities and food for our kids without stress.

None of our wealth was handed to us. None of it was by accident. 98% of the credit goes to Mr. ODA for even have the thought process (I like to take my share for being open minded and trusting his research). My dad was a blue collar worker and my mom worked multiple part time jobs. We never felt like we were “poor,” but working to earn money was what I knew. I believe all your experiences in life are for a reason, but you need to be open to seeing the lesson in those moments. I was open to Mr. ODA’s life plan and financial ideas. I went through Amway with a team that taught “think bigger” type moments for your time. I went to DC for my job way earlier than I ever planned to, and it seemed to be so I could learn the lesson that trading time for money wasn’t how I wanted to run my life.

We STRUGGLED before we were married. We wanted to buy a house, but we didn’t have 20% down. We wanted 20% down to avoid paying mortgage insurance that we feel is a waste of money. We SCRAPED together $80k to get that down payment in Northern Virginia. There were retirement loans, gifts from family, and a concerted effort to spend less than $5 per day on food. We didn’t have a mentality that we were owed anything or that we deserved to give ourselves treats for getting through the week. We weren’t poor, but we knew we had a big goal in mind, and that owning real estate was going to get us more control of our money. Things didn’t really spring board until we sold that VA house and had over $120k sitting in our bank. That’s when more investments came in. That’s when setting multiple small goals made it so that I could quit working full time without us feeling the pressure. I’ve told our story multiple times.

I just wanted to acknowledge that the point here isn’t the literal dollar amount. It’s the freedom that we have. It’s the ability to be on our terms and schedule. Mr. ODA is out golfing this morning. We played pickleball yesterday morning. We aren’t working for our weekend. We aren’t flashing extravagant spending on the weekend because we spent the week working 10 hour days to have the money to live for 2 days and carry the stress of work home with us. And so with that, just take a moment and look at your finances and see where there’s a creep in spending that could be taking you away from a goal. Think about a bigger picture of life.

House1 Turnover

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I wrote most of this post 5 months ago, but I’m going to finish it now for the longevity of what we’ve done with these rental houses. The house has been rented since September and was vacant for 43 days. She agreed to a shorter lease term, so it goes through June 30, 2026.

The tenants in this house moved in 3 years ago. They were good tenants. They hardly asked for things and were super understanding and gracious when we had the HVAC go out (granted it was their lack of filter changing). They brought a dog into the mix and tried to hide it (not well), and I eventually called them out on it to let them know they don’t need to keep finding a way to hide the dog every time I need to come over. They added a 3rd person on to their lease about a year ago. The only major issue I have is they smoked inside the house. I knew it constantly because (just like with the dog cover up) they weren’t great at hiding their evidence.

Earlier this year, I reached out that if they want to renew, I’d be raising their rent from $1200 to $1275. The girl who usually handled the bidding called me and explained they had intended to move to Georgia for a job, but they weren’t ready to move as fast as the end of the lease. I told them they could do month to month for a little, and we agreed to June 30th. I knew I had another lease ending July 31st, so I thought it would work out well that we could address the one house before the other became vacant. In theory. They ended up asking for another month, and we were busy with summer things at the end of June that I agreed, even though it meant two houses were vacating at the same time. I told them that I wouldn’t be able to extend any further though because it’ll be hard enough to rent end of August time frame, let alone into September or later.

On July 29th, they asked me what time they had to be out on the 31st. I said 5 pm. The next day, they asked me if they could have a couple more hours, but I let them know that I had already booked someone to meet them for their keys at 5 pm, and that’s all I could give without it costing them more. I was out of town for this vacancy and asked a friend to be my property manager to walk the property and gather the keys.

They ended up being out and basically cleaned up by 5 pm. I was impressed. The fridge was completely wiped down. The bathrooms were in rough shape, but overall, it was one of the cleanest vacancies we encountered.

THE TURNOVER

We had to have a friend go out to get their keys because we were out of town. I tried to get them to stay until the weekend to make it easier to move, and so that I could be the one to meet them (not that I said that), but they didn’t want to pay the per diem for that option. They ended up keeping their timeframe perfectly.

The turnover took longer than I had planned. I was working part time without a real ability to give up those hours because I had things that needed to get done, and it was summer, so we had 3 kids in the mix. Not to mention, we basically had back to back trips planned for the end of the summer. Overall, it was a learning experience.

We spent about $800 on supplies for the turnover, outside of the carpet, which was about $3,000. With the extra cleaning of the bathrooms and the time it took us to clean and paint the property, we kept their security deposit of $1,200. We could have gone after them for more because of the smoking (I have pictures from when I was doing work in the house of ashtrays with used cigarettes upstairs in the house), but it’s not worth the effort and cost.

FLOORING
Before they moved in, we had ripped out the carpet and installed luxury vinyl planks (LVP). Conceptually, the goal was to not need to work on the floor anymore. We had limped along with the carpet, especially in the living room, since we bought the house, and it just wasn’t worth it anymore. We did the install over two days back then. Now that they were out, there were several gouges in the floor and the floor was separating in some spots. Mr. ODA handled fixing the separation, and he replaced a few boards that were damaged and noticeable.

The kitchen floor was so dirty and it’s the first thing you notice when you walk in. I spent many hours on my hands and knees cleaning out the grout to make it look less dingy. I didn’t get it perfect, but it was fixed. It’s one of those things that no one will ever know just how much time I put in for it to not be perfect, but it would have been so much worse had I not done anything.

BATHROOMS
The bathrooms were a wreck. I’m so lost when I walk into homes and the bathrooms are dirty. Do you want to sit on that toilet or clean yourself in a shower that is dirty? It seems counter productive to me. Mr. ODA had to take over with Bar Keepers in one of the bathrooms to remove the staining and soap scum build up, but we did pretty dang good.

I wish I had a ‘before’ picture easily available to show, because this picture does not do justice to how much time went into this tub.

CARPET
We bought this house 9.5 years ago. The carpet was questionable when we bought it. We would have it professionally cleaned between tenants, and it would look amazing compared to what we saw at first, but the stains would always come back because they were deep in the pads. Before these tenants, we ripped out the carpet in the living room area and laid LVP because the living room was especially bad. Well that still left carpet in the 3rd floor bedrooms, hallway, 2 stairwells, and the whole basement. With the smoking by the tenants and knowing we had far surpassed the useful life, we went ahead and planned to replace the carpet.

There were delays in getting the appointment scheduled and making it all work. The lady who did the measure appointment said installations were 3-4 weeks out. That was disheartening because we had already lost over a week by having back to back trips at the beginning of August. We went into Home Depot to find something else. I ended up settling on something because it said 5 day install. Well, 5 days came and went. I was so frustrated that I had settled on this worse-off carpet just because I wanted to meet a timeline, and now the timeline meant nothing. Then suddenly, we got a call and they said “can we come install the carpet today? We’ll load it now and be there within the hour.” That they did. They installed it in 7 hours and that was behind us.

PAINTING
This took forever. Two big stairwells really take a lot out of your time. Every surface needed to be painted just to work on covering the smoke smell. While we didn’t spend a lot on the turnover (outside of carpet), this house just took so many hours from us. We painted every wall. I painted some of the trim that had not been previously painted, but it was in rough shape. We also had to repair several walls because they had sticky things to hold shelves up and they didn’t remove it.

  • MISCELLANEOUS THINGS DONE
    • Replaced the dryer door handle (that had actually broken off before they moved in, and I thought this was an insurmountable task to fix/replace… well, it was a $6 plastic piece off Amazon that popped right in. Welp.)
    • Replaced window screens that were worn away and in disrepair.
    • Cleaned out all the air filter areas for the HVAC.
    • Replaced all the rusted and broken floor vent covers.
    • Installed a doorbell because they installed a Ring, took it with them, and didn’t put the old one back in.
    • Replaced the cabinet knobs (it appeared someone had spray painted over the original 90s brass with something to mimic a stainless steal look, and they were all worn and chipped).
    • Wiped down the cabinets and walls to get them to be less sticky. Wiped down all the doors, light switches, and outlets because they were so gross.
    • Replaced the broken light in a stairwell that they broke on their move in (and reported).
    • Repaired some ceiling areas that were damaged due to a roof leak before the HOA replaced the roof.
    • Replaced a shower curtain rod that they took with them instead of leaving behind.
    • Painted the front door. It looked like someone had taken steel wool to it to clean it.

LISTING TIMELINE

We got the property to “good enough” stage so we could get it listed. There was still things to get done, but we didn’t want to wait until it was perfect and lose interest as we got further into the school year under way.

We listed the property at the end of August for $1,400. I thought we were golden. The location of this property is excellent, and it’s on a bus route that takes you downtown and to the outskirts of the city for shopping. There were two other listings for $1,500. It didn’t move. I didn’t even get productive bites.

I dropped the price to $1,350 two weeks later. I did show it a few times. I was happy that when I made appointments, people actually showed up, but they didn’t qualify. Mr. ODA hosted an open house and had one person come through. That one person was our person though. I removed the listing two days after the open house and we have it rented at $1,350.

I offered her $1,325 for an 18 month lease or $1,350 for a lease through June 30th so I could get back on a Spring schedule. She agreed to the shorter timeframe. She was looking for a quick move because her landlord was selling her place. Our house seems too big for her needs, so I wouldn’t be surprised if she leaves at the end of June and we need to find a new tenant.

SUMMARY

We knew a September listing was going to be tough, but I didn’t expect it to be that tough. When we had a property managing on this place, they always took 5-6 weeks to get it rented and it drove me crazy. At least 3 weeks from start to finish isn’t terrible, but I’m definitely used to it moving faster. It’s also nice that had my tenants stayed, we’d be getting $1,275, and now we’re getting $1,350. Thus far, this lady hasn’t asked for much. We struggled with the utilities getting into her name. For some reason, the utility companies credited my accounts and billed it directly to her, so I didn’t even need to work on capturing that money from her, which was nice.