Alice n John's Journal

PS: We are in Central Florida

PS: We are in Central Florida

I would say refi yesterday! going from 9% to 4% is huge in savings. Take a little equity out to invest and you can probably still have lower payments.
good luck.

Definatly refy to lower your mortgage payment. Look into a 15 year mortgage. Then set up a HELOC for the remaining equity. Use the HELOC for your investing deals. If you take out equity now, you will be paying interest on that amount (with no return) until you find a suitable investment.

Just my opinion, Al

Welcome to the DG family forum! We're so glad to have you here with us. I think it's wonderful that you are interested in investing as seniors. This is the best decision you could make to secure your future. Al is right, lower your payments and then set up a HELOC (home equity line of credit) and use a fraction of it to invest (just enough for down payments and such). Save the rest for any emergencies that might come up. Once you get some investments you can retire with plenty of money and peace of mind... That's the only way to retire! We're all here to help you, we look forward to seeing you succeed!!

God bless you richly,

Congratulations on starting your journal and being an active memeber on the DG website. If you can save as much as you indicated with the interest you may want to look int othe refinance. Also, look for deals in your area for an investment and then you may be able to use a little of the equity for another deal. The key is to try to put the extra equity you take out back into another property. Sometimes when people take equity out of a home and it may not go where they hope because of day to day expenses that tend to come up unexpectedly. Good luck with real estate investing. Believe and Achieve! - Joe

Hey Folks,

It does our hearts good to get such warmth and caring along with the great advice. Being that we were unable to get any retirement set up, except Social Security. This opportunity is a God send to us. We want to thank you all, B. C., Al, Elena, and Joe for your help.
We are going to give it a try and see what happens. We were thinking this would be our best course of action, but y'all confirmed it.

Thanks again and God Bless,
Alice n John

Hi Folks,

Just to keep current, we are finishing Dean's books and
have start making a few calls to start a buyers list, 2
possibles that we will follow up on.

Got a phone call from, a rep from Deans Academy. We felt
it was going to be too expensive for us and we were right.
It was a depressing phone call because the rep hinted at
we would not be successful without the school. Also said
that most people need more than the books to be successful. :-[
Well, so be it. Alice conveyed to me several of the points
that made us think we could do this in the first place.
We have decided to continue building our buyers list and
to write down our goals.
I was going to write down our Goals, but better talk with
Alice first. We aim to do this together.

Thanks n God Bless to All,
John

Hey Folks,

Its is so nice to belong to such a wonderful group.
We have submitted all the paper work and our refi with a LOC on the side
looks like it will go thru. Our payments will be lower than before and
we will have a little cash to work with to begin our Dream Building!
Yea!

We are very thankful for the advice given by BC, Al, Elena and Joe.

We have spoken to several REA's and all but two were not interested
in what we offered. We met with those two and they were only lukewarm
to our ideas, so we will keep looking for others to build our team with.

God Bless,
Alice n John

I love what you two bring to the table, I am so excited read your post and see how things are going with you. Much success.

Hey folks,

Let us first say thank you to Erika for your kind words. Thank You Erika!
We are having a ball!

Now to Goals!

First, We are going to go with our broad goals such as:
1 - To create extra cash income with DG's Strategies - $1000/mo
2 - To pay off our charge card balances
3 - To create enough retirement income
4 - To Travel the country
5 - To do all this in 3 to 5 years or sooner would be OK also.

Second, We will work on breaking our goals down into smaller goals to come.

BTW, if any of y'all have any advice and/or suggestion on the best way to go about this, We would welcome it greatly.

God Bless,
Alice n John

Hey Folks,

We were plodding along at our own pace and then a home became available two minutes from our front door. It is on the next street from us. It is a 3bd 2 ba
home with in-ground pool. We looked a the property(they gave us the house key-box combo). It needs cleaning everywhere. Painting from one end to the other. The kitchen,dinning room and living room has 18x18 white ceramic tile that is in good shape. One car garage with auto-door opener is also in need of cleaning and paint. Water heater is not working although electric service is still on. AC/Heater unit is on but not blowing cold air it may need a compressor. The landscape is in terrible condition. The pool sits on the back fence away from the house and it looks like a swamp. The pool filter does not work. They are asking 115000.00. After considering all of the above and the other cost involved. We offered 72500.

That was yesterday. We do not know if we will hear back from them. We know it is a little late and we realize we got a little overwhelmed by the process,
but any advice.

If nothing else it was a good practice. heck, we still need to work on our goals, the time sure fly's when you are having FUN.

God Bless,
Alice and John

Did you run the ARV (after repair value) numbers to make sure you will make a profit. You should have this to find your bottom line. Good luck and keep us posted.

Hi Advocate,

Thanks for the input and good words.

We calculated what all of the repair cost might be, estimated cost of closing,
and an amount (1000.00) for unknown cost. Is there a ARV form? We looked for a form to help us do this but did not find one. Being new to this it gets tough to remember everything to do. We looked into the FMV in this area and believe
this house to be worth about 150 to 175 thousand dollars.We had been looking for properties but did not expect to see one so soon and so close.

God Bless,
Alice n John