2012 Goal Status

Last January, I posted about our goals for 2012. Below are the original goals and how we did:

• Buy 2 properties – at least one with seller financing.  COMPLETE. We did purchase 2 properties last year. The first one was with owner financing. The second one was a cash offer despite my attempts to get the seller to bite on owner financing.  
• Put our insurance out to bid. COMPLETE. Val and I had our insurance with 2 different companies before. We sat down and looked at each other policies and I had a sit down with both insurers. Some policies were cheaper at one company and vice versa. At the end of the day, I switched most of my policies to her provider and we ended up saving around $2k per annum. Well worth the effort and we have better coverage.
• Get my Real Estate Agent License. INCOMPLETE. I have over half of the necessary coursework or credits to get my agent license, but we just don’t need it. We have someone that pulls comps for us and this is our primary need. I might look at this again in the future.
• Renew the Property Management contract. OBSOLETE.  At the beginning of the year we were planning on just renewing a contract to manage a property for someone. The current tenant in that property just happened to move out as this contract was coming up for renewal so he just offered to sell us the property. This was the first of our two purchases this year.  
• 30 days or less total vacancy for 2012. INCOMPLETE. I am not disappointed about missing this one. We had a great year from a vacancy perspective. 30 days was a dream target to begin with. If you take out the vacancy period at the time of purchase, then we met this goal anyhow.
• Savings and paydown goals. COMPLETE. Valerie and I met or exceeded all of our savings and paydown goals this year.
• Find another reliable handyman. INCOMPLETE. I am still looking for that jack of all trades handyman as a backup to the one I have. The one we have is so great that no one else gets a chance at any new work we have. I did meet a good painter and another decent plumber this year, so still continuing to build my rolodex.
• $8k per month in rental income by December. COMPLETE. I feel this was our biggest stretch goal. We made 2 purchases this year and that is just what we needed to get there. We feel good with 8 properties and management of these is very comfortable for us.  

We feel really good about 2012 – It was a smooth year for us. We hardly had a phone call for the last three months of the year. Of course the first 3 weeks of this year we replaced a hot water heater, garage door opener, called out the plumber 3 times, and got a call from a neighbor about something. Here we go…….