anderson podcast v
Toby Mathis
Mortgage Options During the Housing Boom
Loading
/

Are you thinking of investing in or buying real estate during the housing boom? What lending options and products are available for investors and other homebuyers?

In this episode, Toby Mathis of Anderson Advisors talks to Benson Pang from NestMade Mortgage in Monrovia, Calif.

Benson started his career as a civil engineer. Then, he pivoted to mortgage lending and obtained his broker’s license. Benson decided to start his own company, which has helped more than 1,000 individuals and families with their home purchase journey.

Highlights/Topics:

  • Housing Boom: People want to own a piece of the real estate market.
  • Why? Rent and home prices are on the rise, and interest rates remain low.
  • Money Options: Trillions of dollars are being pumped into the economy.
  • Who’s looking to buy? Healthcare workers, families, and homebuyers wanting another home or to upgrade with new money.
  • Home Prices: Depending on the location, buyers are offering thousands to millions above the asking price.
  • Appraisals: Buyers need to work with their lenders to close escrow quickly and require financing contingencies to compete with cash offers.
  • Delay Financing, Refinance, or Lien.Ways to get a home and then get your money back.
  • Deed of Trust. After escrow closes, get a rate-and-term refinance loan from the lender.
  • Worst Case Scenario: Understand risk of removing any of the financing contingencies.
  • Cash Flow Crunch: Your tax scenario may not be your cash scenario.
  • Inflation: With more money being printed, comes inflation and raising interest rates.
  • Reality Check: What are you paying in rent? What can you afford to not be house poor? Make an educated choice and lifestyle change before buying a home.
  • Forgotten Upgrade Costs: Once you own a house, you want to do things to it.
  • Should you pay off your home mortgage loan? It depends.

Resources:

Monrovia Mortgage Broker – NestMade Mortgage

Fannie Mae

Freddie Mac

Form W-2: Wage and Tax Statement

Debt Service Coverage Ratio (DSCR)

Principal, Interest, Taxes, and Insurance (PITI)

Toby Mathis

Anderson Advisors

Tax and Asset Protection Event

Full Episode Transcript:

Toby: Hey guys, Toby Mathis here with the Anderson Podcast. Today I have Benson Pang. Welcome, Benson, first off.

Benson: Thank you. It’s such an honor to be on your show.

Toby: We love it. We’ve known Benson for quite a while. He’s not just an investor, he’s also a business owner and has a good mortgage company. They’re in Monrovia, California, right?

Benson: Yeah.

Toby: I always want to call your wife, but I know she’s like your partner, Mimi.

Benson: She is my partner in crime, my wife, mom of my two kids.

Toby: She’s a rock star, too. We’ve known these guys for a long time. If you’ve ever been to an executive retreat, you’ve probably met them because they like to come out and hang out.

Today, we’re going to focus like a laser beam on the mortgage industry and what’s going on there. What kind of products are out there for investors? What kind of products are out there for everybody, just people that are buying houses? I wanted to bring Benson on to say what’s going on because there’s so much stuff. Our printing presses are running to their smokes coming out of them because they’re printing money so dang fast. What is that going to do to our wonderful world of lending? So let’s start there. What’s going on?

Benson: How many packages has it been? There are trillions and trillions of dollars pumping into the economy. I think having that amount of money going into the economy, people are gushing into the market to buy a house. If you don’t already own a house, you probably are thinking about buying because you’re feeling your rent increase. At the same time, all the homes are going up as well and you’re trying to get a piece of it. The stimulus checks are coming in, so you just want a piece of it. If I’m a renter, if I live at home, I probably want a piece of it.

Last year, in 2020, a lot of healthcare workers as well, they don’t want to work at the hospital and then bring it back home. They’re also looking to buy a house to be away from their family for their family’s sake. On top of that, in the last couple of years, people have a lot of children, so they’re also looking to upgrade. A lot of homebuyers are coming into the market to buy with the new money coming in.

Toby: That’s interesting. You had healthcare workers who said, hey, I’m putting myself at risk. They’re either renting or buying another home, is that what we’re seeing so that they could say, hey, I’m going to go to my safe place so I don’t infect my family. You saw that?

Benson: Yeah, because a lot of the healthcare workers, they’re given a certain amount of money from the hospital. Some places are giving out money so then they can rent a hotel nearby. Instead of renting a hotel, they’ll use that money to go buy a house and use it for mortgage payment instead.

Toby: That’s interesting. In my neck of the woods, I’m in Vegas here in California, we saw a lot of issues. You couldn’t even get financing on a house. You had to have come with cash. Were you seeing that as an issue in these situations when they’re going out, they’re bidding on these properties, or was it pretty mellow there?

Benson: Oh, gosh. In California, we’re looking at between $50,000 to even $300,000 above the asking price. In some rare cases, we’re seeing $1 million above the asking price. I’m not sure if that’s a listing agent kind of tactic, but you see a lot of demands going in. On top of that, appraisals are also having some small problems.

We don’t have enough appraisers to appraise all the homes. It could be due to the pandemic. These homes are getting harder and harder to appraise because how are you going to justify $100,000 over the asking price? In California, it’s hard to get into a property. This is where the lender comes in and says, hey, how fast can we close the escrow? Do we need all the contingencies? How can we make your offer as good as cash that you can compete with a cash offer?

Toby: Did you ever have people that just buy cash and then cash out immediately do a refi to say, hey, I just want to get it. Benson, can you refi and get my money back?

Benson: Absolutely. That’s really a talk with your loan officer just because there are a few ways of doing this. One way is called delayed financing. Basically, you’re buying the house and you’re taking a cash-out to refinance afterward. In some cases, they can put a lien on the house. You can have a friend or someone putting a lien on the house, so you’re just refinancing that lien out of that house. At the same time, you’re still doing a cash offer.

Toby: Is that easier than doing it without a lien when you’re just doing hey, I just want to cash out refi?

Benson: They’re both pretty easy. Obviously, if you have that kind of resources, that would be a wonderful thing to do.

Toby: Are there any lenders that maybe specialize in (it sounds like) a bridge loan almost where they’re coming in and saying, hey, I’ll give you the cash to buy it, you got 60 days to refi it. Do you ever see that? Are you seeing, hey, these people have to come and cash out-of-pocket, buy, and then do a traditional refi?

Benson: Yes. There’s actually a couple of FinTech companies that do that, but at a cost. You’re bidding on top of what is already an expensive house. You might be buying it over the market value, and then you’re also adding that borrowing costs on top of it. Now you go refinance and your value isn’t going to be there for you to take the cash back out.

Toby: What’s the rate like? You say expensive, but I know the Californians sell a house in California and come to Vegas and go, oh my God, everything’s on sale. Then they bid it up like crazy, but they want to get cash out to live. But they might be sitting on, hey, I got $2 million from the sale of my property and I’m going to go put it down, but then I need to get that back out. Is there a difference in the rate they’ll pay or what percentage if they do it that way versus just coming in and financing right at the beginning?

Benson: There’s a little trick I do. When you do delayed financing, it’s a cash-out refi. You cash-out refi, as you probably know, Fannie Mae is a risk-based company, they manage risk. Every risk costs money to the borrower. In this case, cashing out money is a risk. To answer the question, yes. When you do a cash-out refi, it’s more expensive than just going out to buy a house as a purchase loan. In fact, now, if you just simply refinance, there’s a 0.5 cost that Fannie Mae added as an adverse marketing fee for all the refinances today.

Toby: You get a little dang if you do it this way, but you’ll get the house. If I’m a seller and I have two offers—one is $3 million and the other is $4 million, but one has financing contingency and the other one doesn’t. I’m probably taking the cash, right?

Benson: Yes, but there’s a little trick around it. Let’s say if I were to go out and buy a house and I have $1 million in the bank, I would put a short form deed of trust on that new house that I’m going to buy. Let’s say I want to finance 80%, so $800,000. I’ll put a short form deed of trust. After I close escrow, I’ll go to the lender to get the loan, and now it’s a rate and term refinance.

Toby: Will they let you do that even if it’s your own deed, or could you do that with your own entity? Could you do that with a friend?

Benson: I’ll try not to use myself as a trustee. I’ll probably use a friend or family member to do it.

Toby: That’s pretty wild. What if somebody has a retirement account? You have a buddy that’s got a big fat retirement account. Could you go to them and say, hey, I got the cash but I want you to lien this.

Benson: Make sure you take care of him after.

Toby: It saves you 1/2 a point, right?

Benson: It would save 3/8 of a point or 1/2 a point.

Toby: On a million-dollar property, that’s a big chunk of money.

Benson: $800,000 loan, that’s $4000.

Toby: All right. When you’re buying—what I’m perceiving here in Vegas, it might be different there—are you seeing that coming in and requiring financing contingencies is costing people deals, is that a reality?

Benson: It’s a real thing. I would advise all the homebuyers, instead of talking to a real estate agent first, you should probably talk to a loan officer and really get that process going to get yourself pre-approved. Get all the documents reviewed so then you get a higher chance. Let’s say if your W-2 file, you’re probably going to be guaranteed to get that loan, that mortgage. You don’t really need that financing contingency.

If you’re bidding over the house, you already know you’re overpaying. You might not even need the appraisal contingency with that mindset. Obviously, you need to figure out what the worst-case scenario, and that’s where I come in and help you understand the risk of you removing any of the contingencies. The least amount of contingency you can do to get into an escrow, the higher the chance you get into escrow. It’s all risk.

Toby: Yes, that makes sense. Shifting gears slightly. We’re talking about residential loans for a house you might be moving into, but what if I’m looking at a property that I want to acquire to make it into a rental—duplex, triplex, fourplex, or something like that—what are my options there? Are you finding that it’s easy to loan on those two?

Benson: If you already own your own primary home and you’re looking to buy an investment, it shouldn’t be a problem. If you’re trying to game the system, it might create a problem, so talk to a loan officer. Recently, a lot of these alternative loan programs have come back online. One of the programs that we were offering, it’s pretty hot right now, it’s called a DSCR loan, debt-service coverage ratio. As long as your income covers the PITI of your monthly payment, then you should be able to get the loan. In some cases, you don’t even need to cover the whole thing to get the loan.

Toby: You’re talking about it. I already have my own house, maybe I’m going to get a duplex, it’s $500,000. I say, I don’t want to tie up all my cash in the duplex. I can basically get financing. What’s the typical thing, 70% loan to value?

Benson: It’s 75% loan to value, so 25% down to get a pretty nice conventional loan.

Toby: Let’s say it’s $500,000, so I put down $125,000, the rest is being financed. Typical rates, are they decent right now? Are they going to go up, down? What do you think?

Benson: They’re great. They’re in the low threes, 30-year fixed right now, zero points.

Toby: You have your balloon or anything like that?

Benson: No balloon, no prepayment penalty. Again, it’s risk-based. If you’re buying a single-family versus a duplex versus a three- to four-unit, they all have different pricing. That’s absolutely a conversation there.

Toby: Do you know any PITI numbers off of a loan of maybe $400,000 off the top of your head, so you could figure out what the rents would look like?

Benson: On a $500,000 house with 25% down, you’re probably looking at about $2300 in PITI.

Toby: So would you need to have $2300 a month coming in rent or net income?

Benson: If you’re qualifying for a conventional loan, we look at the global. We look at your income, your credit, your assets. But your income from your personal employment, and then on top of your investment properties or rental income. You can also use the house that you’re trying to buy, 75% of the gross rental, it’s all added up to calculate that debt to income ratio. If the ratio is right, then you’ll be able to get a loan.

Toby: What’s the typical ratio if you’re just looking at the rents?

Benson: If you’re looking at the rents—I mean, if I have a lower personal income to come in and qualify, I probably want to at least have the house paying for itself.

Toby: Is that what they’re going to look at? Or are they going to look at you, your personal credit, everything—lump it all together and then figure it out. I have a lower income because I’m really good at doing some tax strategies or because I have a bunch of real estate and I’m already depreciating the heck out of things. I’m a real estate professional, so it’s knocking me down. If they look at just the income stream, is it just the gross income stream? Do they play around and say, hey, we’ll allocate 70% of the gross rentals towards the payment and we’ll use that kind of factoring?

Benson: In the conventional loan, we use 75% of the gross rental. Earlier, when I talked about the DSCR loan, we used 100% of the gross rental.

Toby: Wow. Okay. We know that’s not really going to happen, so I’ll just say this as a caveat. Don’t do that. Your tax scenario may not be your cash scenario. I could still be showing $50,000 of income, but actually have access to $150,000 because of the way real estate works. Make sure that it’s not going to put you in a cash flow crunch. Wow, you could really loan, and that’s not so bad. I mean, that’s pretty crazy.

Benson: A lot of real estate investors, they might have a couple of years when they’re trying to maneuver things, and you’re not showing positive income on their tax return. They’ll use this program, buy the house for a couple of years, and then refinance into a conventional loan.

 

Toby: Fantastic. Man, I’ve never been a big fan of debt, but I understand leveraging assets. This is one of those great situations where you’re leveraging an asset.

Benson: I think a lot of times, when people think about a 30-year fixed loan or a 30-year amortization loan, in my opinion, it’s not a 30-year thing. It’s more so just a temporary cash-flow issue, you get to take care of things. You can pay it off whenever you want after.

Toby: Yeah, absolutely. You could be attacking it, but what it’s doing is allowing you to leverage the cash that you have, maybe into two or three properties that you’re in a comfortable situation to then attack the pay downs. How many properties can you actually do under conventional lending? If I want to buy five or six duplexes, is that going to be a problem, or do I have a cap?

Benson: Five to six, you’re not going to have a problem. If you’re talking about 10+, then we probably have a problem, 10+finance property.

Toby: You could have the backing, Freddie, Fannie on 10, that’s the magic number. Now you need to go to the asset-based lender, we know those guys too.

Benson: Yeah. In some cases, you can probably lump a couple of the properties into one loan. You have a couple of low-balance properties, you’re trying to move it over to a property that has higher equity.

Toby: Interesting. You might say, hey, that will take away one of those loans. This one has a little more room. Sometimes, you don’t think of it as a loan per property, think of it as a loan to the value of all your properties. Is that it?

Benson: Yeah.

Toby: You help people with that?

Benson: Yeah, we’ll go through their portfolio, and then we’ll provide some recommendations.

Toby: I’m just going to put a caveat. That’s why we talk to people that actually invest guys because a typical mortgage broker, typical lender, they’re trying to fit you in a box. Make sure that somebody understands what it is that your goal is. If I want to acquire 10 properties, 10 loans, maybe I should be looking at it as how much loan to how much value I should be. Because I may be able to get there with five properties, and I don’t have loans on the other five, but I’m using the value, and that allows me to have more additional loans. If I want to do that, again, I may be picking up 20 properties. Still, I only have 10 loans. Is that a fair way to assess it?

Benson: Yeah, exactly.

Toby: All right, so let’s go back to all the crap that’s going on right now. Again, the printing presses are going crazy. We’re printing dollars. We have $6 trillion on the floor right now that may come through. What’s going to happen to interest rates, and should people be refi-ing now? Should they be looking at doing loans now? Should they be waiting? Look into your crystal ball and tell us. What do you think?

Benson: Well, with all the money printing and as we all know, when there’s printing, there’s inflation. We can all feel it, we can all see it in front of our eyes. My Uber ride from the airport to my house the other day went up at least 20%. The millennial inflation. Lumber cost is going up too, two to three times to what it cost before.

All that inflation, what it really means to the interest rate is the Feds are going to be afraid of the inflation. They might start raising the interest rate, which is what’s going on today. Everyone’s afraid of the Feds increasing interest rates. In the mortgage-backed security world, they’re also trying to raise the interest rate to hedge against what may happen.

Toby: That’s scary. They’re afraid to even talk about it because they think it’s going to take the recovery. We still have artificial inhibitors in the economy with this massive amount of federal unemployment that’s been kicked out. I think that 24 states, 25 states now have opted out, maybe even more because they realize it’s not having the desired effect on their economy. But you just have a lot of fear going on, so they’re scared to say the nasty word of raising interest rates.

Benson: Yeah. They’re afraid of saying anything right now. Not only do you have to say what’s going to happen today, you also have to say what’s going to happen next week or next month. The Feds last year had mentioned that they’re going to keep the rates low until 2022. What’s going to happen afterward?

When it comes to refinancing, I think a lot of people have the misconception that it costs money to refinance, that whatever rate you see on the billboard is the rate for them. That’s how they catch your attention. They’re not there to tell you the interest rate, they’re there to make their phone ring. I think this is where a mortgage broker will come in and help tailor a solution for the client and give them the right choice because it really depends on what your goal is.

Everyone has a different goal. My goal is to live here for the next 15 years, but for some people, their goal is to live there for 5–7 years, and then they move on. At that point, are you going to buy the points? Are you going to get some credit to help with the closing costs? It’s not just one interest rate, it’s a spectrum of it. Which one’s the right one I think is the conversation with your loan officer.

Toby: Fair enough. Whenever you’re calculating—I don’t mean to put you on the spot, just because I tend to be mean. Again, debt isn’t my favorite thing. How hard should somebody be working to buy a house? Should they be chasing after a house? Should they be going 30% of their income with a mortgage payment? Do you ever look at that stuff and say, can you really afford this property? What type of things do you see? What are the weird conversations you have with people?

Benson: Gosh. Every single time we do reality checks. We talk to a new first-time homebuyer and then we ask the question, what is your current rent? Is it $500–$800 and then you’re going to buy a house that’s $3000 per month? A lot of times, I’ll take their hands and say, hey, take a step back and why don’t you try to put away $3000 a month first for the next six months, see how you feel. The last thing I want to do is put you in a house, and then now you’re going to say, hey, Benson, how come you didn’t tell me that I’m going to be house poor now. It’s a lifestyle change. It’s an educated choice that you have to make.

Toby: That’s a really good way to put it. It’d be the total value of the house. I always tell people, look, there are property taxes, there’s insurance, there’s the cost of repairs, you treat it just like a rental property. You’re going to say, I’m at CapEx. I’m putting 10% aside or whatever that value would be anyway, so it might be $1000 a year.

You’re saying, actually live that while you’re renting, throw the extra money. Put $3,000 towards your living quarters (or whatever the value of whatever you think it’s going to be) to see whether you can handle it. So that if you’re getting the house, you don’t immediately have a flipping meltdown. You can’t afford a couch anymore and you can’t afford a bed.

Benson: Look, I talked to buyers that make $15,000 a month, live at home, and have barely $10,000 in the bank. You go, well, you got to start saving because you’re going to have to make a big payment on the house. You might not like it.

Toby: What you’re saying is you’re really popular in that first meeting when you’re doing the reality check when everybody else is saying, oh, you make this. We can find you a house for that.

Benson: My goal is to educate you as a buyer. My goal is not just to make that dollar and move on. I’ve been doing this for a while and I’ve seen things.

Toby: You know when it’s wrong and you know people are setting somebody up for an ulcer.

Benson: Yeah.

Toby: This is going to be a delayed bomb. You’re going to have a heart attack in about 10 years trying to carry this thing.

Benson: I’ve seen people who didn’t listen. After they buy a house, they put it back on the market in a year just because they couldn’t afford it.

Toby: It’s pressure.

Benson: It’s pressure everywhere—social media, media, TV, television, and radio. We talked about interest rates, we’re talking about mortgages all the time. Your family’s like, hey, you’re getting older, you need to go buy a house. But then the real question is, ask yourself, are you ready yet?

Toby: I love that. I’m a numbers guy so I like to crunch them, but I never really thought about it. Hey, live it. Here’s what your mortgage would be. Here’s what the costs would all be. Let’s lump it all up. All right, spend that, put that aside. Take your rent out of it because we want it to be equal, but see how that feels. What would you do? Six months, three months, 10 months, whatever.

Benson: I’d do six months just to see how you feel. Guess what? Your bank account is going to get fat too when you’re saving that money.

Toby: Or you’re going to be like, I can’t afford it.

Benson: Yeah.

Toby: Which is fine. Have the reality check. As you said, you’re better off not doing something and realizing that thank God, I didn’t, than doing it and going, oh, I wish I hadn’t. It’s really tough to get out of a house, 8% to 10% to dump it. Really brutal, but I love that. I’m going to steal that totally.

Benson: Then they always forget about the upgrades. Once you own a house, you just keep wanting to do things to it. […] the backyard, buy plants, this and that. You have perfectly fine lights but you want LEDs. There are always things that you can do through the house once it’s yours.

Toby: I remember my first blinds. It was $11,000 to put in blinds in the house. Some of you guys are like, it’s not that much. That was the first time, I don’t even have the size of a house now, but I bought it. I thought it was the bee’s knees. I just remember going, man, that’s a lot of money—$11,000 for blinds. And they were the cheap ones.

Benson: Curtains, do you know how many curtains you have in the house and you have to wash them.

Toby: You got to do weird stuff. You’re going to get the lawnmower. I live in Vegas where we all have rock yards. Here, water is expensive and anything electric is expensive. You got to figure those things out. Do you ever sit down and get that granular with people and say, here’s what your utilities are going to be looking like, here’s what this stuff is? Do you ever sit there and flick them in the forehead, like, hey, you’re going from an apartment to a house? Your electric bill is going to go from $50 to $200.

Benson: We go deep. Actually, in a lot of locations, I point them to your workshop. I tell them to go take a course on self-finance and learn about it yourself. You can hire financial advisors later, you can hire whatever planners later, but you have to learn how to do it yourself first. At least you know that someone’s going to screw you over.

Toby: You know what to look for when they say come right on in here, we can have this all set up for. Thank God that there are people like you, Benson and Mimi. You guys are actually doing that because I see the repercussions so often when somebody is trying to get out of their position. I don’t know if you were doing business during the recession.

In Las Vegas, we lost 75% of our values, and you watch people’s lives literally crumble. Their famous last words, but I have equity. They’d always say, but I have equity in my house. Nobody wants your house. You financed it at $1 million, now it’s worth $200,000. That never happens. No, it happens, and it happened here and the average was a 75% reduction in value. Now it’s recovered. The old adage is you’re only 10 years away from fixing any mistake. You just got to sit on your hands, and you’ll be okay.

It’s really hard when you’re carrying a huge debt load. We saw it. It was just so heartbreaking to watch people’s lives literally get decimated because they bought something they couldn’t afford.

Benson: I think right now today with our system, I think that fixed a lot of issues that we had back in ‘04, ‘05 because people are actually really getting underwritten. Let’s say if you buy a $1 million house, you put $900,000 down, you’re still going to go through the whole process. You don’t get any priority. You don’t get the 60% debt to income ratio. You’re still 45% just like everyone’s debt to income ratio. You still have to provide pay stubs, W-2s, and tax returns.

Toby: You’re like, but it’s only $100,000.

Benson: Yeah, I hear that a lot. Well, go make that $100,000 so you don’t have to borrow any money. The other thing, I see a lot of people that I helped back in 2012-13. Now that they’re 5, 6, 7, or 8 years in, because their income had gone up, they started putting more money into the principal on their 3.25% interest rate that’s fixed for 30 years. When I see that I cringe. I go, you need to figure out what to do with that extra dollar that you’re making.

Toby: You see them just paying it down and you would tell them, hey, don’t necessarily pay it down. You got a 3.25% interest rate, it’s not horrific. That’s about inflation. Actually, it’s probably less than inflation right now. You’d be better off trying to get a greater return on those dollars.

Benson: Yeah.

Toby: That’s fair. Again, I’m not a big fan of debt. People ask me this all the time, should I pay off my house? Well, it depends. If you have better use for the dollars and you can make 7% to 8% pretty without breaking a sweat—which you can do right now with dividend-producing stocks and things like that—then I would say probably do that instead. It’s not a bad idea, like in California especially, to have a debt against your house because it’s not protected under the homestead.

If you own your house outright, you might be asking for a problem. Unless you can do a friendly lien or put a line of credit against it with your own entity. There’s all that stuff, but it’s just making sure that you’re not a sitting duck. But, heck, if somebody is willing to give me 2% money and I know that I’m without breaking a sweat, am I going to bring in six? I’m doing that.

Benson: Yeah, absolutely. I think that’s the point. These people that work so hard for their money and they want to tuck it away as soon as possible into the house that unless you refinance again, you can’t touch that money again. Unless you sell it or refi, you can’t touch the money. What I tell them is to put it in a bank or something and then the next question is, well, I don’t know what to do with the money. I tell them, that’s because you don’t have it yet. Once you start saving enough, once you learn how to save some, go talk to my friend Toby and he’ll give you a whole list of things that you can do.

Toby: I appreciate that. That’s absolutely true. You got to buy assets that are paying you. A lot of people just go on more vacations or maybe buy more expensive furniture, don’t do that. Get it towards producing the income off of it, and then take the income if you feel like it and buy those things, but definitely put it in the asset first.

Benson, thanks for joining us. Enlightening, as always. I love sitting and talking with you. I’m just really appreciative of you for spending the time with us today. Any closing thoughts? Any pearls of wisdom that you want to throw at anybody before we conclude?

Benson: I would say that the market’s going cuckoo. If you’re looking to buy a house that’s over the market price, you have to check out what is the break-even point, inflation, appreciation of your house. If it’s going to go up X amount of percent depending on your location. Talk to someone who knows their stuff so you’re not overbidding. There’s a breakeven point. I think talk to a professional.

Toby: Great one. Calculate everything, and in the really good words of Warren Buffett, “When other people are greedy, be fearful. When other people are fearful, be greedy”. If you see a lot of greed, go at it with a little bit of trepidation and then calculate the heck out of everything.

Benson: Calculate.

Toby: Benson, you’re a rockstar. Thanks, brother.

Benson: Thank you.

 

Read our blog post to learn the differences between a Deed of Trust and Mortgage.

As always, take advantage of our free educational content and every other Tuesday we have Toby’s Tax Tuesday, a great educational series. Our Structure Implementation Series answers your questions about how to structure your business entities to protect you and your assets.

Additional Resources: