Question on renting
Posted By: dm on 2006-10-04
In Reply to:
Does anyone own a home that you rent out? Could you please give the pros and cons of renting out your home as we are thinking about doing this. Any info would be greatly appreciated.
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Renting
When I first started out I was renting a duplex and had a CPA do my taxes. It allows you to deduct the percentage of the sq footage that is used for your office, i.e if you have 10% in an office then it deducts 20% of your rent from your IC wages. Say you have 1000 sq foot home and your office is 10 x 10 or 100 sq feet. which is 10% of your total sq footage. If your rent is 700 per month it will take off $70 per month for your office or 840 per year. There is no property taxes thast can be deducted as you do not pay direct property taxes -- just in your rent.
Renting information for you...sm
1. Check with any agency that regulates residence rentals in your state to make sure you follow the current laws.
2. Check references on potential renters - it's well worth the $50 to have a person's background checked.
3. Spell out the rental terms explicitely. For example, if late fees kick in after day 5 of a missed payment put in writing what the late fees are. You may also want to put provisions in there (if allowed by your state) for things like yard maintenance (if the grass goes more than 2 weeks without being cut in the summer they pay an extra x $ for you to hire someone to do it), provisions about if the police are called out for problems that they are evicted, etc. Again - check with the state governing agency to make sure you don't violate any laws.
4. Some people choose to hire an overseeing agency to handle rental agreements, do the background check and collect the rent. Most of the ones around Atlanta charge 10% of the rental fee as their fee, so if you choose this avenue set the rental rate at a level to cover this.
5. Be sure to check with your homeowner's insurance regarding an umbrella policy to cover in the event a rentee gets hurt on your property. Also your current policy coverage would change.
6. When figuring out the rent rate, find out what comparable homes are renting for in the area and be sure to calculate enough to cover the mortgage, insurance, upgrades, and impact to your personal taxes (you have to report the income but can write off a percentage of any upgrades).
Good luck - being a landlord can work out very well as long as you do your homework first!
I don't know about renting short term,
I think you could rent it and then return it, but you would have to ask. A friend of my rented-to-buy a Dell PC from them and learned a lesson. She paid approx. 200 every two weeks for almost a year. You will pay 3-4 times what the product is actually worth.
leasing is same as renting a house, never the best financial choice...sm
bottom line is somebody is making money off of you leasing. If they didn't make money off of you, they wouldn't lease. Same thing with renting. Renters always cover the mortgage and repairs on a home while the owner reaps the benefit of building equity. Now cars are a little different as they definitely depreciate while homes do not (usually!) but as I said, if they weren't making money doing it, they wouldn't do it. You can easily find a traded-in used vehicle with 50,000 or less at a dealership. Get one of the yearly reports from Consumer Reports and you can find which cars are the most reliable (for example, Buick LeSabres - those things run 4ever). Best financial move is to buy it from a private party with cash. I mean showing up with the whole offer in $100 bills. Few people can pass that up. If you can't get the money together to buy a car outright, you will for sure never get ahead driving someone else's car and paying them for the privilege of it. And you are just kidding yourself if you're driving around in a "new car" that you can't even afford to buy.
Question inside about Renting from Rent-A Center. sm
What was your expeience? Is it very expensive? I was thinking about renting a laptop computer to use for work on vacation for a couple of weeks and not ready to invest in purchasing a new laptop yet. Can you rent things for about a month or do they require longer?
Thanks for any help you guys might give.');>![](https://forum.mtstars.com/smileys/shake.gif")
This is a fantastic idea actually (renting hotel room)
It may be tax deductible. I actually like my home and it is affordable as I got it at a low price several years ago and put a big down payment on it. In other words, I doubt if I could repeat this. No small children. What I am thinking of is that I will probably have to work until I am 60 at least. The only other option would be to go back to school and get training in another skill but even that seems difficult. I have no idea what I could learn and work at other than nursing.
Thank you very much
leasing in like renting - paying someone else for the privilige of driving their vehicle..sm
with the low mileage you put on vehicles, you would have an easy time selling outright to a third party. Crunch the numbers. figure out what you would pay for leasing, including deposit. Figure out what you could buy that same car for. If you hold it for 5 years, you can get an idea of how much cars depreciate by checking blue book prices on the current model and a 5 year model. Use that to figure what percent it would depreciate. Then add your leasing costs all together. Add your car payments all together. Then subtract from the car payment what your car would be worth in 5 years, because you'll get that back, ya know. IMHO leasing is done by people too lazy to figure out the numbers and by people that it's important to "look good" to the neighbors, regardless of what your bank account actually holds. Hope you don't mind my honesty. 
Not true. There are times that renting a home and leasing a car make more sense.
than outright purchase. Do your homework.
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