House #2 Closed: Sort Of

Not a heck of a lot went perfectly smoothly with House #2, and closing has been a similar story. We “closed” last Friday, signed all the papers, dotted all the i’s, but the buyers still hadn’t received the second part of their settlement money from the great State of Texas, which should arrive this Thursday or Friday. So everything is signed and waiting for the funds to arrive, at which point they get the keys, we get our money, and much drinking ensues (for me at least).

Obviously a bit frustrating, especially since the state officials dealing with the issue originally claimed they were ready to cut the buyers a check back in early April, but not a huge surprise and not the worst thing to deal with, as far as waiting a bit longer for money to appear so that the buyers can pay in cash.

Even without a flip house to work on I’ve stayed pretty busy the last few weeks. Operation De-Clutter culminated in a big yard sale last weekend, and we managed to make about $300 from selling all sorts of ridiculous, unnecessary crap we’d accumulated over the years. It also had the nice domino effect of clearing out our storage unit to the point that I can move all the stuff we’d been storing in our carport/garage to the storage unit.

Other plans have been on hold as far as waiting for House #2 to close, as we’re getting the pier and beam foundation of our house leveled, at which point I can start on renovating and tiling both bathrooms, kitchen remodel, etc. I’ve checked out a few investment properties lately but nothing is really leaping out at me, so I may focus any house renovation efforts on our home for the near future, instead of tackling another flip.

I keep flip-flopping (har) on future real estate investment plans, at times convinced I’d be crazy to wade into another flip and at other times equally convinced that I’d be crazy not to. I really, really enjoy the work and process itself, much more than any other job I’ve had, so that’s a definite reason to keep diving into the real estate waters. Juggling all of my current jobs makes it possible to keep tackling real estate investments on the side, which I do enjoy, and which have made me a decent amount of money so far.

On the other hand, I’m really, really close to being able to bid adieu to the boring, soul-sucking corporate day job from a financial point of view, as far as all the freelance work and other assorted money making schemes being able to replace the day job salary. Which would make me very happy. Very, very happy. But it’d also make taking on more real estate deals very hard, as far as getting approved for loans, having steady income coming in to fund renovations, etc. If I quit my day job I’d really have to put any REI plans on hold for a few years as I built up the freelancing/business income to the point where there was once again excess cash floating around to plunk into real estate.

So yeah. Dunno. Another alternative would be to try to marry the two by finding investors for real estate deals, so that I’d essentially be managing the projects, but not footing all of the expenses and risks. Which I really wouldn’t mind, as I’d do that in a heartbeat if I could make an equivalent salary (or even slightly less) to the current day job. The only problem is that opportunities like that are fairly limited in the small town that we live in, and working with investors carries its own set of unique difficulties, some of which would take away from what I enjoy about the whole house flipping thing to begin with.