I thought now would be a good time to check up on what I have accomplished and take a look at where I am headed.

My own home.

-I contacted a buyers agent.  Found a house (3/1) in an older neighborhood.  I picked up the house for 90k with a VA loan.  Current market value is 125k. 

-Minor repairs throughout.  Replaced the locks.  Bringing the lawn back to life.  It looks pretty good actually.

-Security system.

-Replaced the original furnace circa 1954.

-New gate.  Slightly fancier then surrounding gates, but it goes well for a cottage feel.

Plans:

The house could be resold without additional work, but there are some things I would still like to do.

-Replace the windows 3k?

-looking into French doors when I replace one of the back windows. 1k?

-move washer to utility room 1k?

-refinish cabinets 1k?

-add dishwasher $300?

-remove dead trees from back yard $500?

-foundation work 3-5k?

-back patio. 1.5k?

-mud jack the front patio. $500?

-front and back minor landscaping 1k?

total = 10-15k

The biggest items are the foundation, cabinets and windows.  Everything else can either be dropped or minimized.

Rentals

-This year I started acquiring rentals. I now have 3.

-4 houses in 9 months exceeded my wildest expectations this year.

-picked all the houses up with very little down.  Purchased each with hard money and did an immediate refi.  Since the properties were purchased below 80% current market value my cost consisted of little more then closing costs.  Although Fannie Mae pulled some quick changes and raised my costs slightly 5% for each house is not to bad at all.

Plans:

-Hold the houses for at least one year.  Sell one or more for cash and either use that towards my self storage goal or use it to purchase more houses.  Either way is fine by me.

Flips

-Soon I will begin working on financing to flip properties.

-I’ll go into my flip criteria in another post.

Blog

-The blog initially started out covering the fixes on my own house, now it will cover just about any business venture I pursue.  Since this is my open journal, I want to look back and see my accomplishments.

Ok so the last two are future oriented only, but that ok.  I’d rather look to the future, because its very hard to move forward when looking behind you.