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Monthly Archives: January 2019

Keeping Track of Projects

Lee and Mike discuss improvements and refinements to the kanban board on the wall.

One of the complicated things about real estate investing is keeping track of all your projects and what stage they are at. Not only that, but we need to know who’s providing the money, when we owe payments, who is working on the houses, and what’s coming next.

We’ve tried lots of ways of organizing, mostly involving spreadsheets (we mainly being Lee). It takes a lot of work and thought.

I get frustrated by how hard it can be, because I happen to work for a company that sells really nice products that let you build project schedules, create kanban boards, make assignments, and all those handy things. But, we can’t afford even the small business version of Projectplace. I do highly recommend it if you have a slightly larger small business or a big ole enterprise. We also have a product called LeanKit that works great for Agile projects and revolves around its kanban features. Too bad I can’t use it at THIS job!

So, Lee decided to make our own big kanban board,* so we can all look at it and see at a glance where we are in our projects. We happen to have a large, empty office at the moment (the former minister office that isn’t cleaned out yet), so Lee and Mike (who is handy with tools and also creative) started to work on a prototype.

*What’s a Kanban Board?

A Kanban board is one of the tools that can be used to implement Kanban to manage work at a personal or organizational level. Kanban boards visually depict work at various stages of a process using cards to represent work items and columns to represent each stage of the process. Wikipedia

Here’s a great description of how kanban boards are used, from Planview, where I happen to work during the week.

Lee likes this system, because he gets to use colored paper and print things out. He loves printing things out. Mike is interested, because he plans to build us a board to do this with, rather than use the wall.

This is a sample LeanKit board, which even looks like sticky notes.

Stay tuned for reports on our project progress board as it makes its own progress. Let’s see how well we reinvent the wheel!

Here’s an actual, workingProjectplace kanban board, with details all blurred out.

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The Lessons Learned in Mattress 8

So much potential.

It looks like Mattress 8 can go off the for sale list and onto the Lessons Learned list in our sidebar. We reserve that list for special projects that we had high hopes for, but just didn’t work out like we had hoped they would. I’m sure all real estate redevelopers and investors have projects like that (if you don’t, you will).

We’d sucessfully worked on projects in the Temple area before. We did the Ash house with the Andress team, and they had a great general contractor lined up who did a very good job. Lee and I did another house out there in partnership with our friend Vern, who lives in the area. That one also went fine, because he had local contacts.

We continued to include the area as we prospected for houses to buy, and were excited about the Mattress 8 house, which was in a transitional neighborhood with some nice looking houses and some not-so-nice ones. Once we cleared out all the junk and renovation supplies, we got a reasonable bid from the same guy who did the Ash house and all was well…until he had some serious family issues.

This wallpaper fragment was my favorite part of the house.

We waited a while, then tried very hard to find new contractors. The minute we showed them that they’d have to follow a plan and would be paid upon completed work, they’d skedaddle. That did not mean we were going to change how we did business. We want real names, real contracts, and real schedules, which a professional would be glad to provide.

Lee and Mandi went back and forth to Temple many times only to have people not show up, or disappear very quickly.

When we put it on the market, the same thing happened. So many no-shows, other than one neighbor who really thought we should just give it to them, because a family member used to own it (or something like that). They kept calling Mandi.

Kitchen. Before.

But as we know, Lee can be quite creative in selling a house, so when a legitimate fellow investor got interested, they worked out a way to sell the house for not much more than we paid for it, but over time, with good interest. The buyer didn’t pay more than the house was worth, but we do make a profit, just over time.

It’s not ideal, but we learned a lesson: there’s more than one way to sell a sad house.

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Planning for Success!(ion)

Coronation

A wise person told me a long time ago, “We don’t plan to fail. We just fail to plan.” I am constantly amazed by the amount of planning that goes into running a business. Every day is a different plan:

  • General business plans
  • Tax plans
  • Floor plans
  • Construction plans
  • Scopes of Work
  • Budgets

The list seems endless. It probably is.

What If Something Happens to You?

Today I want to talk about something nobody wants to talk about: succession plans. Continue reading →

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Measure First, Install Fridge Later

Planning the move with Mike, David, and Lee.

Slowly but surely we are upgrading The Hermit Haus (aka the old church) to have better infrastructure. Appliances were on the agenda this week. First, we had to remove the old stove and refrigerator and put them in the house we are trying to rent out in cameron. Mandi plans to write up the fun and adventure of that project, soon as she has time. They also brought in a very nice new-to-us stove that we bought from our neighbor when he got an even nicer one (he cooks all the time; he deserves the nicest stove ever).

Next, we needed to have our new refrigerator, which Smart Shopper Lee got a great deal on or it would not be such a snazzy one, delivered and installed. That sounds easy, but we forgot that this is an old building and nothing in it is up to code. All the usual suspects showed up to help: me, Mandi, Lee, David, Kim, and Mike.

Mike and David push while the delivery guy is up there pulling. Vlassic the dog wanted to help.

One look at the back entrance told the delivery guy that nope, that wasn’t going in THAT way.

So they went to the front of the building and in a feat of great strength, got the thing up ALL those stairs. I was impressed at their 1-2-3 style for pushing up each stair.

Then, they looked at the stairs down to the office. There is a bit of random ceiling poking out (and collecting dust) that pretty much completely prevents getting anything large down there. I’m glad our display cabinet comes apart into two pieces, or it would not be downstairs, either.

I’m sure something important is inside that odd ledge with the dusty red carpet. It’s inconvenient, for sure.

In the end, the beautiful new wi-fi capable fridge is sitting in the front of the sanctuary, looking like it’s ready to preach a sermon.

So, Now, What Do We Do?

We hope to get a mini-fridge for my very valuable coffee creamer, in the meantime. Sigh.

We need to get moving on that renovation!

I’m here, ready to address your sanctuary refrigeration needs. If only I had a plug. And a water line.

 

 

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Tax Blah Blah 2019 Edition

I gave my calculator quite a workout.

Even though—or maybe because—the government is shut down right now, the Treasury cashed my fourth quarter tax prepayment in record time. At the same time, the 2019 updated tax brackets showed up in my news feed. That’s convenient.

So, I thought I would take a few minutes to provide you with a quick 2019 update to my last post, using the same $600,000 taxable income example. Let’s see what has changed.

Here is how it looks in the new brackets:

Top of Bracket Marginal Tax Tax
$6,999 On the first $9.699, you’d pay 10% $ 970
$39,474 On the next $29,775, you’d pay 12% $ 3,573
$84,199 On the next $44,725, you’d pay 22% $ 9,840
$160,725 On the next $76,526, you’d pay 24% $ 18,366
$204,099 On the next $43,374, you’d pay 32% $ 13,880
$510,300 On the next $306,201, you’d pay 35% $ 107,170
Infinity and Beyond On the last $80,700, you’d pay 37% $ 33,189
Total Tax Paid $ 186,988

 

I find it interesting that, although the brackets have all moved upward a bit to allow for inflation, the total tax payment at $600,000 goes down by $702. At the same time, the amount of tax owed by people in the lowest two brackets actually goes up. Draw your own conclusions.

Of course, I’m not a real tax expert (just a recovering statistician), and there are a lot of ways to lower your overall tax bill if you talk to a professional.

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