This entry will specifically be about where we are at in our investment journey. I mentioned last time that we opted to go through Rent to Retirement (R2R). That little sentence has so many little pieces that got us to where we are today… waiting for the contract for our first property to be sent our way.
You can go to R2R’s website and for the low low price of your email, get a list of their active properties available for purchase. The list gives you the purchase price, initial investment (the down payment at 25%), and your expected cash flow and ROI (key pro forma ingredients). You don’t have to be a member to purchase a property, but once you join, you get to look at the properties before they hit the general public.
You will get follow up emails and you have the option of signing up to speak with one of their investment strategists. I can’t remember if I had to, but I decided to sign up. When you create an account, they ask you how soon you want to invest and, knowing we were not immediately ready, but would be within the next 6 months, I clicked that button. Since we had already decided that we were interested in R2R as a whole, I signed us up for an appointment with ” Adam” on a Monday at the end of October.
I don’t remember a lot about the conversation, but I remember walking away feeling like we had learned a ton and gotten a lot of free advice. Since we weren’t going to invest in 2023, Adam recommended we sign up for the Academy. We knew the fees for the Academy were waived if you bought a property within 6 months, so we did not sign up until January (closer to our goal investment date).
*Side note: Adam’s full name is Adam Schroeder. Ken saw his name and was like that can’t be right, he’s in all their youtube videos. It was the same Adam, and Ken had a bit of a fan boy moment.
We ended the conversation with a bit of a game plan and an agreement to touch base in a couple of months. We eventually signed up for the academy in January and started to get serious about our plan.
A week or two after our call with Adam, I got cold called from someone at NCH (Nevada Corporate Headquarters) who told me they had gotten our information from R2R. My initial reaction was very skeptical and I told the caller as much. He did a good job explaining the relationship between the two companies (I now know that NCH was fundamental to R2Rs beginning), but between my innate hatred of cold calls and planning two children’s birthday parties while hosting Thanksgiving, I told him to call me back in a few weeks. In the meantime, I did some research and even saw that NCH is featured on R2Rs website.
My skepticism abated, I scheduled a call with an analyst a few weeks later. Now if we got nothing else out of this experience, the advice and help we’ve gotten from NCH would be worth the time and money we’d put in so far. We have learned so much about LLC filing and taxing (and still have so many questions) that I think NCH will get its own blog post.
For now, let me say that when starting REI, you will hear a lot about systems, and getting systems in place. What this means is figuring out how you are going to buy (legally not financially) rental properties, especially out of state, how you are going to manage those properties, and how you are going to pay (or deduct) taxes with the income from those properties.
It was very important to Ken to have these systems in place before we started investing. Me being the more impulsive in the marriage, convinced him that we could do both at the same time.
Using NCH, we created an LLC for REI and the properties we were buying. We also began working on a Revocable Living Trust. This process is still ongoing but we now have legal entities and employer identification numbers so things felt real.
We will also use NCH for tax planning this year and to create real estate privacy trusts for each property we end up buying, but again, more on this later.
Actually, since this entry is getting long, more on everything later.
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