I’ve told you about my trials and tribulations searching for tenants. It took a while, but we have tenants we love in both apartments now. I also told you about my experience using Cozy.co to vet tenants and collect rent online. Overall, the apartment rental scheme has had a few minor bumps, but it’s basically been pretty easy.

I’ve even run the optimistic return projections. But one thing I haven’t done is finish an actual income statement… until now!

The Numbers

I treat the rental property as its own entity, aside from our personal income and expenses, so I can see how it’s doing as its own business. Is it self-sustaining? Sure seems like it. I mean, I see the rent roll in each month, but what kind of profit is this place really making?

Even though we bought the place in July, I am counting from September 1 to March 31, since September is when we made our first mortgage payment.

Rental Income Apt 1: $2,981.94 (2 + 3/4 months) Apt 2: $5,209.68 (5 + 1/2 months)

Total Rental Income: $8,191.62

We were lucky enough to find tenants for Apt. 2 immediately after advertising it in September. Apartment 1 took some more time. We didn’t find tenants that we wanted until December, and they didn’t move in until January. So during the seven months, the units sat empty for a while.

Rental Expenses

After seven months
Rental Income: $8,191.62
Total Expenses: ($15,219.10)
Total Profit: ($10,282.72)

Well that’s not very encouraging! A ten thousand dollar loss so far?? Let me explain why we are showing a loss.

Maintenance – The biggest expense so far has been what I label “maintenance.” This includes many things that we had to get done before we could get tenants moved in.

Washer and dryer – We knew that when we bought the house, one unit had a washer and dryer in it. Well, apparently they were strictly for decoration, because there was no electrical hookup or plumbing hookup. Someone between our inspector, our realtor, and us, should have, but didn’t notice this. I only noticed it about a day after coming home from Japan, and the day before the tenants were going to move in!

As much as I would’ve loved to do everything DIY, there just wasn’t enough time.  We promised the tenants a working washer and dryer, and I had to scramble just to get an electrical contractor to put in the correct 220 volt outlet and a vent for the dryer, and a plumbing contractor to put in the washer and dryer connections. All told, our tenants were without a washer and dryer for a week and a half, but were very understanding about it.

Chimney – We’re lucky that our inspection went so well. We knew the house was in very good shape, and our inspector found nothing wrong with the house except for the hot water heater exhaust was clogged with dust from the chimney.  Long story short, we had to get the chimney re-lined, and that cost $1,805. We were happy to just get it done and not worry about it.

The other washer and dryer – Even though our first apartment was rented in a heartbeat, our second one sat on the market for weeks without an inquiry. We decided it was because there was no washer and dryer in the unit. What I thought would be a good way to attract two different types of tenants to the two different types of unit (one with w+d, and one without) didn’t work out. We spent $950 (after Lowes coupons) on a new washer and dryer and actually had our tenants agree to move in just based on the promise that the washer and dryer would be there by their move-in date.

Property Taxes – $3,606 is the bulk of our property taxes for the year.

Gas  – Since the heating is gas, and it is included in the rent, we pay for it. This statement covers the coldest months of the year. This should be much lower for the next five months. We’ll see how close my initial estimate of $100 on average per month will be.

Okay, so imagine that we drop all of the maintenance expenses ($5,317) and that the two units were occupied for all seven months (another $5,983 in rent), and suddenly we’ve turned a profit.

The good news is that, so far this year, we’ve made a profit in January and March, and probably will in April. The only reason February was not in the black is that part of our property taxes were due, and we bought that washer and dryer. I see our property turning a tidy profit soon. I’ll post another income statement after the first twelve months.

Any rough experiences out there for first time rental property owners?

The post Our Rental Property Income Statement, The First Seven Months appeared first on RidinKulous.

A little background. I have been bouncing around the idea of buying a rental property ever since we bought our house in 2008. Since then, I’ve probably bought four Rental Properties for Dummies-type books on the subject.

On the plus side, it would create a new income stream. It seems like everyone who is financially independent has rental income. On the negative side, things can go wrong. Owning a rental property means work. And the biggest of all, buying a rental property runs roughshod into my biggest financial goal: Destroy All Debt Forever.

See, the only way to make a good return on an investment property is to take out a mortgage, thereby establishing a cash flow with only a small down payment. If you were to pay cash for a building outright, the rental income would be the same, but ROI would suck.

So while I haven’t been super-serious about searching out rental properties, I have kept it in the back of my mind. I am really only interested if it meets my critera:

• Close to home, ideally within walking distance and the historic district.
• Between 2 and 4 apartments.
• Costs less than $50,000 per apartment.

Luckily, where we live, housing is affordable. Our 1,900 square foot house cost us $130,000 in 2008. Rental properties are even cheaper. Marge and I have even tossed around the idea of basically owning our entire block, a rental empire! At these prices, this is not so far-fetched. So I had an alert set up for multi-family homes in the area. It went off yesterday. Ding ding ding!

About the house: It is a two-family and lists under $100,000. Both apartments have two bedrooms and one bathroom. It’s a historic building that the listing claims was built in 1890, but from the outside at least, it looks just like our house built in 1860 which is just down the street. The outside is really pretty. Green painted brick with red accents. They even have a walled-in porch.  It doesn’t look like many abuses of history have occurred, like vinyl siding.

I can only speak to the outside, because there are no photos of the inside. A previous listing shows photos, but only odd fisheye lens photos with an HDR filter applied making it impossible to tell what size the rooms are, or even if those are stains on the carpet or just effects from the filter. Yes, this house was previously on the market last year for $10k more and didn’t move, which concerns me. Although this new listing says there is all new plumbing, carpet and paint.

A 30 year mortgage would probably mean monthly payments of $350, and a 15 year mortgage would mean payments of around $510. Not bad! Those crazy low payments of $350 are very appealing, but the rates on 15 year mortgages are under 3% right now and that’s even more appealing. Of course, I’m not sure if the rates for multi-families will be that good.  Property taxes are probably around $3,000 a year, and you have to add insurance.

If everything went right with this building, the return on the investment of our down payment could be 70%.  Of course, that’s given that the two apartments are both rented out, and there are no maintenance issues! I don’t see many empty apartments in our neighborhood, so I don’t forsee big vacancy issues. Apparently, the current owner is also an accountant who thought “the numbers looked good.” But he lives out of the area, had a bad tenant, and wants to get out badly. The real estate agent told us this. Is this house cursed for accountants who think the numbers look good? Uh oh.

But you see my point. Nowhere could you make a return like that on your $18,000 down payment investment. I even looked ahead to age 55 when I could begin to collect my pension, and a two-family rental would produce almost as much as the pension!  Meaning that a couple rentals like that and I wouldn’t even have to worry about how much my pension was.  And so I think I have to swallow the idea of Destroy All Debts Forever, shove it deep down inside for a while, and think about this cash flow.

Anyway, we’re going to look at the building in person tomorrow.  I guess I’m here to ask, does anyone have any tips on what to look for when inspecting this house? I mean, we should be the best judges since we live in a very similar house in the same neighborhood and would be familiar with the problems. It is totally vacant right now, so we should get a clear look at everything. I just have never looked at a rental before.

The post Rental Property Advice Emergency! appeared first on RidinKulous.

Before Marge & I even bought a rental property, I was looking into easy ways to collect rent. For me, the dream of owning a rental property is all about watching the monthly payments roll in. Instead of imagining all of the work that would go into running a property, instead I started investigating ways for tenants to pay rent online. Possibly, this is what all early retirement types fantasize about in their spare time. Passive income just showing up in the bank account.

There are some leaders in this online rent collection space who I won’t name, but overall, I was surprised that there wasn’t really one agreed upon website for processing tenant payments. After reading some positive reviews and seeing how they kept expanding their box of tools available to landlords, I decided to start an account with Cozy.co, a startup based in Portland, Oregon.

I initially wanted to join Cozy for the rental payment system. There’s no charge for collecting rent electronically, which is more than can be said about some of their competitors. But I also really liked the additional services they have set up before you even have tenants.

Firstly, and this is very recent, you can make a listing for your property online. Similar to other listing services, you can upload photos, write a description, put your contact information and check off the applicable amenities. That’s great. I don’t know how many people are finding listings on Cozy.co, so it’s definitely not a replacement for Craigslist or your favorite real estate listing website, but it’s nice that it’s there.

Then from the listing, prospective tenants can click through to go to an online application. You can also just straight up link to the application on Craigslist, which is where we’ve found all of our tenants. Cozy’s website is the only way I accept applications. I want to use as little paper as possible as a landlord. I am bound to just lose paper, forget to make copies of things I need, etc.

When people apply through Cozy’s rental application, I get an email alert, and their application appears on the website. This was also nice because I didn’t want to have to search for an example of a rental application to use. Their application includes spaces for a references, work history, contact information, and even a little bio which some of our tenants have filled out in rather adorable ways.

Also you’ll notice, one nice detail is that Cozy will calculate what percentage of the applicants’ income will be spent on your rent. This is an important metric to vet your tenants’ by. And as soon as you visit the site to see a new application, there is a nice percentage in the corner.

The number one best thing about the application process, though, is that you can require a credit and criminal background check before the application is submitted. I love this. I require both checks with any application, and applicants do it right through the Cozy website. Once someone applies and fills out the background and credit check, the application and credit check come in almost immediately. The background check sometimes takes an hour or two to come back. But I get everything and it’s all linked together with their application on the website.

What I don’t like is that Cozy kind of markets their credit and background check as free. Well, it’s free to you, because the tenant has to pay for it. It’s $34.95 to complete both. I don’t know how common it is to have your tenants pay to have these checks done. So I tell my applicants up front, if I accept you, I will refund you the $34.95. It’s definitely been worth it. I can even adjust the first month’s rent bill on the website so their bill is lower by $34.95.

Nice to see this

Basically the only thing I do outside of Cozy is verify employment. I require two weeks’ paystubs (this is too difficult for some people). Now wouldn’t that be great if an applicant could upload a photo of their paystub directly through Cozy’s mobile site? Then I’d be all set. I wouldn’t have to ask for anything. The website would be doing all the work! Uh, Cozy, is anyone listening?

Machines can do the work, so people can think. Which reminds me of one of my favorite videos…

Once you’ve approved someone, you can set up their lease on the website, and link your bank account to it. The tenant can then link up their bank account and either pay manually each month or set it to draw automatically. There are other options like not allowing partial payments, which is important because if you are thinking of evicting someone, if you accept even a partial payment, that can constitute your acceptance of it as a month’s rent in court.

The website keeps a ledger of payments. As you can see here, these tenants paid their security deposit and first month’s rent as money orders, so I created an Offline Payment to credit their balance on the website. Otherwise, this all happens automatically. Both of our apartments’ tenants pay through Cozy, and that has worked flawlessly, although the payments take 5 days to show up.

I am fairly lenient on payment dates. I have it in my lease that if they were sending a check, it would have to be postmarked by the 5th business day of the month. Similarly on Cozy, I want the payment made on their side by the 5th business day. The fact that it doesn’t actually hit my bank account for a week doesn’t bother me. So if immediate payment is an issue for you, you should know that your rent will not show up for a week. You can blame America’s antiquated ACH system for this more than you can blame Cozy.

So in short, so far my experience with Cozy has been great. It’s taken out a lot of the paperwork, footwork, and just plain work, from vetting tenants and accepting payments.

What about other rent collection services?

Cozy is far from the only landlording website. There’s Rentulations, TenantCloud, TurboTenant… I haven’t tried them, but lucky for you, Domenick at Accidental Rental has, and he’s done a bang-up comparison of all of these services so you can make an informed decision!

If you own a rental property, how do you collect rent and screen tenants? Do you hate paper as much as I do?

The post My Review of Cozy for Landlords appeared first on RidinKulous.

Can you believe it? It’s been two years now since we bought our rental property! In 2015, we had been maxing out our retirement accounts and looking for a new type of investment. Going by all the early retirement blogs I was reading, it seemed like the next step was adding rental property to our portfolio. The jerry-rigged returns you can conjure by buying a rental property with little cash down are pretty incredible. So I bought some books and read up on what to expect.

We bought a two-family house that hardly needed any work. We had more money than time, and were strictly interested in having a positive cash flow as soon as possible. We didn’t want to be stuck paying for renovations and waiting to rent it out.

Here’s a summary of what’s gone on for the past two years:

July 2015 – We buy the house for $134,000. It’s vacant and in good shape, so we get to work cleaning it up and doing some maintenance. The chimney needed re-lining, and we needed hookups for a washer and dryer on the second floor apartment. We had a lot of discussion about what prospective renters would be looking for in an apartment, and a washer and dryer seemed right at the top.

September 2015 – We find out first renters after listing the apartment on a Saturday, giving them a tour on Sunday, and getting the lease signed that week. This was extremely lucky. They move in in mid-October.

December 2015 – The first 1st floor apartment is still vacant after doing numerous showings and getting some unattractive applicants.  We eventually get a couple and they move in in just after New Years, after we purchase a washer and dryer for that unit. (We had been leaving this one unit without a washer and dryer in order to attract those tenants that have their own. That didn’t work out, as you can see)

Winter, Spring, Summer 2016 – This was the golden time. “They were serene days and quite undemonstrative.” Rent was always paid on time, we hardly heard a peep from the tenants, and everyone was getting along. We didn’t have any major repairs, although the 30 year old washer in the 2nd unit broke, so we bought a new one.

October 2016 – Our first tenants let us know that they won’t be renewing and are moving to be closer to work. We become dizzy with greed and get anxious to fill the unit as soon as possible! We accept new tenants and they move in just after Thanksgiving. The less said about them, the better. Pretty soon, we realize…

February 2017 – After a few nightmare months, we buy out our tenants’ lease by giving them a free month’s rent, and then vow to better vet potential tenants in the future, even if it means the unit stays vacant for longer. We soon get a referral from the 1st unit tenants. Their friends visit, love the place, say they are looking for a place to stay long-term, and sign a lease. We let out a huge sigh of relief.

June 2017 – We replace the ancient fridge and stove in the 2nd unit. (My parents laughed when they saw these appliances) One of the 1st unit tenants start mowing the lawn and raising a garden in the backyard. We let out another huge sigh of relief and for the moment, we’re back on easy street.

So far, it’s been some work, but with huge variations from month to month. This summer, we’ve only been to the apartment a few times for minor things (replace six window blinds, replace kitchen sink sprayer, re-paint backdoor stairs). Compare that to seemingly endless showings you have to do sometimes to get a renter. I wish I could estimate how much work it is on average per month. Five hours possibly? I have no idea.

Here’s our income statement for the past two years:

So after two years, we have finally turned profitable to the tune of… $2,526. Not huge, but everyone has to start somewhere, right? And if my 5 hours of work per month is correct, that is $21 per hour.

On the plus side, our profitability has seen a huge swing from Year 1 into Year 2. We basically ended our second year with $9,000 more in income than we made in the first year. The big swing is due to a few things:

1. Spending $4,500 less on maintenance. We repaired the chimney, had electrical and plumbing work done, and replaced several appliances in the first year. Much less this year.
2. Taking in $2,000 more in rent.
3. Spending almost $3,000 less on insurance… although that’s due to a timing difference. Whoops! Looks like we paid part of Year 2’s insurance in Year 1.

What is our Return On Investment?

That may be a silly question after just turning profitable, but let’s do the math anyway.

Out of pocket, our down payment and closing costs were $12,456 in cash, so let’s call that our initial investment. $25,000 of our 20% down payment came from that home equity loan.

ROI = ($2,526 profit/$12,456 investment)/2 years = 10.1% annualized

OK, that’s actually not so bad. Ten percent is good for passive investment income, but income from a rental property isn’t truly passive income, no matter what the personal finance commentators might suggest. I’ve never had Coca-Cola ask me for a lawn mower or ask to have the heat turned up. They just pay me dividends! So maybe the better measure of rental property income is the hourly wage I attempted to calculate above.

Do you have an investment property? What is your return and how do you measure it?

The post First Time Landlords: Second Year Income Statement appeared first on RidinKulous.

Since most of what we watch streams over the internet, there was little holding us back from ending our cable bill entirely. Mostly it was due to two shows made for old people: Antiques Roadshow on PBS and Sunday Morning on CBS. Once I realized that PBS has a pretty amazing free streaming channel (seriously, if you like any PBS shows, they are probably there) then the only thing left was Sunday Morning.

You know Sunday Morning. It’s the show previously hosted by Charles Kuralt and is now hosted by Charles Osgood. It’s the perfect Sunday morning news show for people who hate the news. It’s relaxed with a bright outlook and reporters that prefer to tell you about the blueberry pie festival in Podunk, Michigan, or the Barefoot Contessa’s biography rather than whoever ISIS is threatening to behead next. Although they do manage to cram every dark event of the week into a virtual five minute horrorshow at the start, the other hour and 25 minutes are just a breeze, with stories on the arts, food and nature.

So for us, having cable has basically become a very expensive way to watch CBS Sunday Morning every week. This is literally the only show we want to watch that we can only watch over cable. What do most people do who still want to watch network television, but without paying for cable?

Get an Antenna!

As Part 2 in our saga of “cutting the cord” with Time Warner, today I’ll let you know how our antenna adventure went.

Before buying any antenna, you should know what you need. By looking up AntennaWeb.com, you can plug in your address and find all of the broadcast towers around you. The website helpfully tells you how far away each station’s tower is so you know what range of antenna you need to buy. Our two main towers are to the south in the Helderbergs, and to the east in the hills of Rensselaer county, both within 40 miles.

I did my research and ordered the most well-reviewed cheap antenna on Amazon that worked for that range. It is a stiff, flat panel that you basically tack onto your wall. It doesn’t look like an antenna at all, but people claim that they can get all kinds of stations, stations they didn’t even know existed!

So how many stations did we get? Three. And that was after fooling around with all possible wall placements. We got NBC, PBS, and a strange thing called MyTV which only seems to broadcast shows so old they might be in the public domain.

It wasn’t all bad. For the stations that did come in, the picture was perfect! Full HD, which we never seem to utilize on our tv.

Look at how perfectly rendered the color is on Johnny Weir’s jacket! (Yes, that is the Winter Olympics. Can you tell this experiment has been going on for a while?)

So while the picture was good, it didn’t get us the station we wanted, CBS. There’s a good chance the problem was our location. We are in the middle of a city, and our house is smaller than the surrounding ones, meaning we have no straight shot view of any broadcast towers. Clearly, we needed more power, so I returned the antenna, and got the next more powerful antenna: The same design, but it is amplified, meaning you have to plug it in, and it amplifies any faint signals picked up.

To help this antenna pick up CBS, I ran its cable all the way to the upper south side of the house! Yes, you can follow that cord out of the living room, through the dining room, up the stairs, through the library, down the hall, and into the bathroom, about the clearest shot we can get at the CBS tower.

Do you spot the DIY Charging Station from earlier?

This was just temporary, of course. I would have figured out a more elegant solution… if it had worked!

I go through all that trouble with a newer, more powerful antenna, and we still picked up just those three channels! So I returned that antenna, and upgraded to some real firepower.

Now that’s an antenna! That’s an antenna like antennas are supposed to look! This bad mofo can be mounted indoors or outdoors. And it’s big, so it can pick up a wide range of frequencies. You could probably pick up transmissions from Uranus with this antenna!

… OK, maybe not. And after installing this in the prime CBS tower location, we still couldn’t pick it up!! It picked up another one or two stations more than the wall-mounted antennas did, and that’s it. I was starting to worry that we’d never be able to cut our cable, so I looked more into the mechanics of antennas and frequencies.

UHF vs VHF – I had that covered. All of the antennas I tried received both of those. But what I didn’t realize is that some most VHF transmissions are on higher frequencies (Channels 7-13), but our CBS broadcasts over a low-VHF frequency. According to Channel Master, only about 2% of stations nationwide still broadcast over low-VHF. So almost no antennas are made today to pick up frequencies that low! And that’s why our antennas didn’t pick it up.

To pick up a low-VHF station, you have to buy a special giant antenna. Since low frequency radio waves are larger than high frequency waves, you need a large antenna to receive them. Try looking up low-VHF antennas and you will find that your selections are few, huge, and expensive. You’re looking at $100 minimum, and even then, we’d have no guarantee that it would work.

So what did we do? Stay tuned next time for Part 3 of Cutting The Cord and I’ll show you how we eventually did it!

Any antenna users out there?

The post Cutting The Cord, Part 2: Antenna Madness! appeared first on RidinKulous.

Today, we compare FANS vs AN AIR CONDITIONER!

Cooling down our big brick house is not easy. It’s a two-story building without an attic, which means that all the heat goes to the top floor and stays there until you let it out. The problem is that our bedroom is on the second floor. So although the first floor stays relatively comfortable throughout the summer, the upstairs is always 5-10 degrees warmer.

This makes sleeping difficult or impossible. We have one air conditioner, and it’s for the bedroom. The rest of the upstairs can remain hot. It’s actually really nice during bedtime rituals to walk from a raging hot 88 degree bathroom into the cool comfort of an air-conditioned bedroom.

There’s the guy right there.

But everyone says air conditioners are expensive to operate. Surely, it’s true, right? We see our electricity bill spike during the summer months, and it must be partly due to the A/C. It’s not a big jump, but it’s noticeable.

So every year, I run into the same debate. When to put in the air conditioner? We start out by using fans to push the warm air out the windows and draw cooler air in throughout the day, and that works marginally well. And this probably saves money over the A/C. But how much more? On the hottest days, we are running a ceiling fan, a floor fan, and a pair of window fans all day long. How much more expensive is it to run just the air conditioner instead of all of these fans?

Air circulator

Let’s have a look!

We have three main fans. I searched around and tried to find the approximate wattage used by each of them:

To figure out the cost of running the fans, we have to figure out how many kilowatt-hours they use.

To get kilowatt-hours, you take the wattage of the device, multiply by the number of hours you use it, and divide by 1000. (Dividing by 1000 changes it from watt-hours to kilowatt-hours.)

By running all three fans, all day long, that’s 195 total watts x 24 hours = 4,680 watt hours.
Divide by 1,000, and that is 4.68 kilowatt hours (KWH) per day.

Our electricity bill has a ridiculous breakdown of the costs per kilowatt hours, down to ten-thousandth of a penny, but if I add all of them up, I get $0.1093884 per KWH.

So, using 4.68 KWH for the fans times $0.1093884 is $0.51 per day.

What’s the cost of the air conditioner?

We have an six-year old 8,000 BTU air conditioner, and going by what I see on the internet, it looks like it probably uses 1,000 watts. Hmmm…

So, 1,000 watts x 24 hours = 24,000 watt hours.
Divide by 1,000, and that is 24 KWH per day.

Multiply by the cost per KWH of $0.1093884 and you get $2.62 to run the A/C all day.

But wait! We don’t use the air conditioner all day long! We only use it during the night, while we’re asleep, and sometimes just for a nice read in bed.

So more realistically, 1,000 watts x 8 hours = 8,000 watt hours each day.
That’s 8 KWH, which is only $0.87 per day!

Or, if you prefer, 87 cents per comfortable, restful night.

So the reality of this fan vs. air conditioner fight is not what I believed. Yes, running the air conditioner all day is five times more expensive than running the fans. But realistically, by running the air conditioner for 8 hours, we  would spend only 36 cents more per day over the fans.

Is it worth it? In a worst case scenario, every day of the month is roasting hot. That’d be 30 days using the A/C, or $10.80 a month more. Consider how awful a month spent sweating in bed and getting four hours of sleep would be, and I think the choice is clear. On those hot days, bring on the A/C!

Result: Cheapskate loses.

Are you a fan of fans? Or are you A/C Slater?

* Big bonus points to anyone besides Marge who gets that reference.

The post Cheapskate Analysis: Fans Vs. Air Conditioner appeared first on RidinKulous.

My bedroom was the only exception. There was stuff everywhere. It was organized, but there was just a lot of it. Lots of CDs, videotapes and books, notebooks, video games, and just the detritus of my interests.

Typical dining room scene

Over the years, I’ve tried to be more tidy. So I was intrigued to hear about Marie Kondo last year. The queen of tidiness, most people know her as the obsessive compulsive organizer who verbally thanks her possessions before throwing them out. Her methods involve getting rid of anything that does not “spark joy” in you. “What about the mixing bowls?” I would think. “Or the flathead screwdriver? They definitely don’t ‘spark joy’ but I use them.”

Here’s a clip of Mario Kondo helping an American tidy up on our favorite station, NHK:

Initially I wrote her off as a nutcase. But this year I came across the Danish concept of hygge. Basically it translates as “coziness.” This means valuing things like nice lighting, warm socks, reading a book, having a cup of coffee or a piece of cake. Whatever it is that makes you feel nice. And little things make a difference. (I read The Mezzanine this year, and there is an extended comparison of the different types of door knobs, because some really are nicer to grip than others!)

Hygge extends to your surroundings, like the fabrics on the furniture, and, big surprise, tidiness. Being a Scandiphile, hygge innately appeals to me. This focus on the cozy seems like a good way to live. The Danes are frequently ranked as the happiest people in the world, and they attribute this partially to the  hygge lifestyle, so maybe there is something to keeping your surroundings tidy. I’m on board now. I want to be hygge af.*

Better ask the queen how to do it.

So I got her book out from the library. KonMari doesn’t cover every type of item. Most items around a house would fall under her catch-all category, komono or “miscellany,” which might seem frustrating to those of us who own more than clothes, books, and mementos, her other categories. But there are over-arching guides she gives you.

Every item must “spark joy.” I think this goes for some things, but not other things. Better, I think, is her suggestion to take out and handle every thing you own. Looking at your cupboards isn’t enough. By taking out and handling each item, you’re more likely to identify something you don’t need and get rid of it. Don’t just leave the stuff sitting there because it “lives” there. Take it out and imagine using it.

In KonMari’s world, you are surrounded by a carefully curated selection of items that bring you joy. I don’t think it’s possible for the average person to live in KonMari’s dream world, so I scaled back her suggestion a bit to something less severe. Sometimes I just fell back on the old, “How long has it been since I’ve used this?”

It’s an odd book. It’s about half good ideas, and half crazy person talk. (Her book hints at a very bizarre childhood) She seems very touchy-feely, but behind that is actually a very cold analytic view of possessions. Once an item has served its purpose, it should be discarded. Her focus on the present is summed up well here:

“When we really delve into the reasons for why we can’t let something go, there are only two: an attachment to the past or a fear of the future.”

I combed through my closet, dresser, kitchen and basement… Well, part of the basement.

Clothes

I started in with the clothes. I threw out about eight pairs of socks and a pair of boxers.  I also instituted one of KonMari’s more well-known bizarro imperatives: Don’t ball up your socks. It makes a kind of inherent sense. Balling them up will weaken the elastic, and the resulting balls just sort of bounce around in the drawer.

Old Halloween Costume. Bye bye.

The way KonMari puts it, she acts like you’re actually hurting the socks’ feelings. See what I mean about being 50% good ideas and 50% insane? At any rate, I simply take two socks, fold them together, and then stack them in the drawer.

I eventually made my way to the closet. I have been really good about keeping a manageable selection of pants on hand. (Hold for applause) There’s about ten pairs of pants I wear for work folded in a neat pile, and I literally just work my way down the pile. Every pair gets used. I also have two pairs of jeans I wear, and that’s really it for pants.

Shirts have not been so well curated. I took all of them out and handled them one by one. KonMari’s “spark joy” advice might be a bit much, but I do definitely agree with her idea of taking everything out and handling each item. Just looking at the shirts on hangers isn’t enough. After going through the shirts, I found about a dozen to get rid of.

One other bit of KonMari wisdom I agree with but don’t totally follow:

“By folding your clothes neatly, you can solve almost every problem related to storage.”

She folds every piece of clothing so it sits up vertically on its own on a shelf or in a drawer. This is a funny piece of magic and would surely save a lot of space. But she is totally against stacking anything once it’s folded. (The weight will cause creases and hurt the clothes’ feelings or something.) So with an array of vertically folded clothes that can’t be stacked, does this mean I have to put everything on its own shelf? Do I need triple the amount of drawer space so they can all stand in a row on their own? She never really explains.

Stacked sweaters. Oh the humanity!

Paper

In the miscellany category, she does mention what she does with paper files, and it might seem strange: She just throws them out. According to the book, as soon as she gets a piece of paper, she throws it out.

“I recommend you dispose of anything that does not fall into one of three categories: currently in use, needed for a limited time, or must be kept indefinitely.”

That seemed a bit extreme to me, but it is true that most important documents today are available digitally. Insurance policies, utility bills, tax files… We get most recurring bills digitally, but I have a habit of keeping every kind of paper bill someone hands to me whether I will ever need it or not: Veterinarian bills, auto maintenance bills, anything from a doctor’s office. I have manuals for every appliance. Anything from our investment plans or social security.

Formerly two file boxes in the Expedit

They sure seem important, but I just never, ever go back and use them! So there is something to KonMari’s zero tolerance paper policy. I went through our files and got of everything that was more than a year old, unless it held some peculiar fascination, like my first paystub, or tax files. I threw out all of the manuals I couldn’t download or were really unncessary. And now we only have one box of paper files.

And now… all the files we have

Miscellany

In one case, I kept an item which I don’t think I’ve ever used, but did “spark joy.” It’s this weird cranking grater. It probably can’t hold more than one garlic clove at a time. I’ve never used it because, being buried at the back of a drawer, I forgot it was there. But it only cost $1.99 at Goodwill (the tag is still on it), and even though it is awkward to store, I’m going to keep it, damnit. The design is just too clever, and I want to at least try it out. Then I can decide if it’s worth keeping.

In the kitchen, I threw out lots of chopsticks, plastic tongs, a ladle, a whole bunch of tote bags, wooden spoons, cardboard drink carriers, takeout menus for restaurants we haven’t been to in years, weird plastic wine glasses that end at the stem, a rolling pin, and one bamboo sushi-rolling mat (do we really need two?).

All the garbage. Doesn’t include clothes sent to Goodwill

I also went into the basement, which was full of far too much stuff to get through in one day. I did take KonMari’s advice on cardboard boxes. I have stacks and stacks of them, waiting to be used for moving or shipping items. Still waiting after eight years of living here. So I recycled those

There’s definitely a lot more “kondo-ing” to do, but that’s enough for now.

Would you “Kondo” your house?

*Hygge af is also the name of the lifestyle brand I want to start

The post The Marie Kondo Test appeared first on RidinKulous.

(This one is going to be vitriolic, so I hope you like the taste of vinegar)

Time Warner got hell a few years ago for suddenly charging you $5.99 a month for the rental of a modem that was already in your house. I know why they did it, but I’m still not sure how they got it past regulators. Time Warner, obviously, would just love to raise their rates.  But raising your rates takes a lot effort.  Since they are a utility, they would have to prove that they are experiencing increased costs, necessitating higher rates to be paid by all customers.  They couldn’t prove that, or didn’t want to, and didn’t raise the rates. Plus, they would have to advertise this new higher price, when fees can just be hidden away.

So instead, they invented the modem rental fee.  Suddenly, the charge showed up on our bills. I never knew I was “renting” a modem from them. I never agreed to a rental agreemen, but suddenly I was part of one. Doesn’t make much sense. It wasn’t a new modem or anything, just the same old junk they had given us years earlier.

By the way, this month the modem lease fee increases to $8.00! For the same modem!

There is a way to get out of it. If you buy your own modem, you can return the “rental” modem to Time Warner and eliminate the fee. Time Warner has a list of modems that will work. Amazingly, they will actually tell you which models will work! I wanted to future-proof ourselves so I wouldn’t have to buy a new modem ever again, so I figured out the newest, most-advanced model. That’s the Arris/Motorola SB6183.

New sci-fi modem, owned free and clear

Apparently a lot other people had the same idea, because this modem was sold out on Amazon with no sign of returning. But Ridinkulous Nation, we are smarter than this! I set up an alert on eBay to tell me if this modem was ever listed.  Well, it soon was, and I grabbed it for a Buy It Now price of $60. It retails for well over $100 on Amazon.

Then began the second part of our modem lease adventure: Returning the old modem.

The new one was easy enough to set up, and I dare say it delivers faster speeds than the old one.  Now all I had to do was return the old modem to Time Warner.  You can’t send it in the mail.  A considerate corporation would give you a box with postage to return it.  That would be too nice of Time Warner, though.  They make you go to their awful store. The local store is located in the mall, of all places, meaning I had to go to the mall! You can imagine how miserable this was. I never go to the mall, but now I had to take time out of my day to return this garbage.

You can’t just drop off the modem either. They make you wait! The gall! The unmitigated gall! There is a serial number on the modem that is tied to your account so I should just be able to drop it in a bin.  There is no end to Time Warner’s disdain for their customers.

Anyway, I leave the modem with the cashier and go home, expecting to see the charge taken off the next bill. Wouldn’t you know, they still charged me for the modem I didn’t even have! I find it hard to believe that this wasn’t on purpose. There are three reasons why they would continue to charge me for a modem that I returned:

1. Nefariousness – Expecting me not to notice that the fee was still attached to my bill and continuing to pay it.
2. Incompetence – An employee didn’t do their job in re-inventorying the modem. I find this hard to believe because the cashier checked it back in in front of me.
3. Shitty Tech – None of their systems are connected. A modem connected to my account could be returned but have no effect on my account.

Time Warner is a tech company, for better or worse, so I have to believe their systems are automated to an extent. But it could be a combination of reasons #1 and 3. It could be Shitty Tech built shittily on purpose amid the aforementioned environment of disdain for their customers where they don’t care whether the modem gets taken off your account or not.

Here is another fee or two you might not know you’re paying:
$2.75 Broadcast Fee
This is a fee you pay for the privilege of receiving local broadcast stations over cable. It’s a charge by the local stations charged to Time Warner for the right to broadcast their over-the-air networks. Time Warner simply passes it onto the consumer.  If you ask Time Warner why they started charging the fee, they’ll say that it’s “important to educate our customers on how these broadcast fees impact them.” I’ve never heard of payment as a form of education

Nevermind that we’re already paying $9.99 a month for these basic networks, or the fact that you can get them for free over the air. The $2.75 is, quite explicitly, an idiot fee charged to us cable subscribers not smart enough to just use an antenna. “Since you don’t want to use an antenna, we’re going to tax you.”

Sports Broadcasting Fee
Well, news just came down that Time Warner is using their favorite new tactic, the invented fee, again.  There will be a new $2.75 monthly fee for sports programming. Not just for the people who watch ESPN, NESN or SportsChannel (does that still exist? Can you tell I don’t do sports?). This is a fee that everyone will pay, whether you watch sports or not. Because, apparently, it’s a societal good that we all experience sports in the culture, so it should be subsidized by everyone… Bah! That’s a $33 yearly tax for sports! Or a $33 sin tax for not watching sports! However you want to look at it, it’s a dick move to end all dick moves. With our basic cable channels, we don’t even get a sports network!

I’ve absolutely had it with Time Warner at this point, and I am now convinced that they need to be banished from our home. I have been trying to get an antenna to work for a few months with no luck, but now I am going to double down and once and for all put this Time Warner bill out of its misery. Our bill from Time Warner right now consists of $55.49 for internet, $9.99 for basic cable, plus the above mentioned $2.75 broadcast tv fee, and soon, the $2.75 sports programming fee. With an antenna, I will be eliminating $15.49 a month, or $185.88 a year.

Time Warner, you can go eat a bowl full of dicks and die.

So… seen any good tv shows lately?

The post Cutting Cords and Reducing Fees with America’s Worst Corporation appeared first on RidinKulous.

That rental property wasn’t a complete bust, but we decided it wasn’t for us. After seeing it in person, Marge and I each secretly wrote down a number from 1 to 10 to indicate our level of interest in it without discussing it beforehand.  I wrote down 5, and Marge wrote 3.5.

The house purports to be built in 1890, 30 years after our house was built, but there were so many similarities to our own house, I doubt 1890 is correct. Doorways were in different places and rooms were different shapes, but you could tell, this house was the same design. I knew our house had a doorway into the living room from the foyer at one point because you can kind of see the shape in the plaster. This rental property still had that doorway! We nerd out about old house stuff, so it was interesting to see some original layout details.

We have basically decided we have more money than time. There are lots of things I can do to improve a given house, and some things I can pay to upgrade, but once those things start numbering more and more, I just don’t know how we’d find the time. This house wasn’t in terrible shape, but it was enough that it would take a long time to take care of the needs (replacing a big janky covered staircase in the back, skim-coating or replacing plaster walls, getting the rear exit up to code, cleaning up the basement and replacing boilers) let alone the wants (replacing wood paneled walls and tearing out the drop ceilings everywhere).

Seriously, I KNOW one room’s ceiling is two feet taller than it appears because, in our house, it’s our bedroom. The drop ceiling is completely covering a circular window on the side of the house. What were 70s people thinking? Damn you, Peggy!

Oh, also, it used to be a funeral home up until 1962. Weird, right? We decided this wasn’t creepy on its own. If a murder happened in the house, that’d be creepy. But dead bodies just coming through? Not creepy. Still, the only way to enter the basement of the house was from the outside, and instead of stairs, there’s a very steep concrete ramp. Guess that’s how they got the bodies down there!

We decided that, even if the price came way down, it would just be too much work to make it something we’d be proud of. Meanwhile, we got the house hunting bug and started looking all over that night for other rental properties.  Later, we got realtor-ed up, went to look at a bunch more rentals, and are just now putting in an offer on one!

We are pretty much doing the opposite of what you’re supposed to do, which is buy the worst house on the best block, by buying probably the most fixed up house on the block. We visited probably over a dozen rental properties and kept running into problems like outdated fixtures, old furnaces and water heaters that would have to be replaced, weird moist basements. Nothing that would make a house uninhabitable, but lots of things I knew we would have to fix now or soon.  And since time seems to be in incredibly short supply these days, I was seeing fixes that would either take us months to DIY, or that would cost us much by hiring out.

So we are putting in an offer on a place we can rent out immediately and get that cash flow going. Marge especially fell in love with this place. It has two apartments with the possibility to add a third in the gigantic attic. The apartments are 1,300 square feet each I think, and it’s very near the elementary school, so we would probably be looking for families. It would be no problem at all to get renters for this place. And since everything is new and nothing seems to be in disrepair, we wouldn’t have to think about that stuff. But getting all those upgrades come with a price. The asking price is $150,000. The monthly rent is, supposedly, $2,000 total. $1,200 for one apartment, $800 for the other, but we would have to see how that shakes out in reality. We are putting in an offer of $125,000 since that is more in line with the neighborhood. We’ll see.

In blog-related news

I received my first bizarre, targeted marketing request. In that entry about the first rental property we looked at, I had mentioned that we were searching for rental properties by using a popular home search website. I got an email from the company asking for me to insert a link in the post to their homepage, since I had only referenced them by name, without putting in a hyperlink! How dare I!

I’m not sure how much of a real person was involved in sending the email, and how much it was purely bot-driven. I’m sure this happens all the time to more popular bloggers.  Well, needless to say, I went back to the offending entry and… deleted any reference to the company whatsoever. I’m pretty insulted that some corporate jack-off thinks I’m going to go back and give them a hyperlink. This isn’t some small company. If they want advertising, they can go buy it somewhere else. They should’ve been happy that I even mentioned them by name in the first place.  It was gross.  So I had to waste my time reading and deleting the stupid email, and they lost a name-check on the internet’s #1 coolest personal finance blog.  I’ll still use the website, but I won’t be mentioning them by name again.

Any company that gets a mention on this blog should feel blessed that I deign them worthy of even mentioning. Don’t push it and ask for more.

The post About That Rental Property appeared first on RidinKulous.

I predicted that the next five months would be profitable since we had tenants, and didn’t expect too much in the way of maintenance. And mostly, that’s been the case! Our rent payments have been rolling in electronically through Cozy. And we haven’t had any major repairs. Basically, all I’ve been doing is going over to mow the lawn.

One bad thing: We were just informed by our first tenants that they will be leaving after their year lease is up! Argh! That’s just how life goes for a landlord I guess. So soon we will have to filter through the punks and rejects to find some more worthy tenants.

Here’s how the first twelve months went.

Rental Income

Rental Expenses

Total After 12 Months

Well what a difference five months makes! After just five months of normalcy, we brought that 10k loss down almost to our breakeven point! That didn’t take long at all.

Over the past five months, aside from our fixed costs of a mortgage, home equity loan payment, and utility bills, the only big expense we had was a new washing machine for one apartment. You’ll remember, we had to buy a washer and dryer pair for one apartment to get it rented.

Well, the other apartment’s very old washer (on left, at least 30 years) started giving the tenants problems, so we replaced it rather than try to fix it. The new washer cost $582, so if it lasts 30 years… hell, if it just lasts ten years, it will be worth it. That would be just $58.20 per year against $11,400 of annual rent payments for that apartment.

Hey, also a nice estimation by me regarding the gas expense. I estimated it would cost $100 a month, averaged throughout the year, and it came out just under that. Even though I had the heat turned up to a stifling 71 degrees just to keep everyone happy.

With a sunny outlook towards the future, let’s take a look at what would happen…

If the next year is like the last five months

Assuming we get new, good tenants and everything stays stable like the last five months, this is what our annual income statement would look like next year:

I guess we’ll just have to wait and see and check in again next year at this time. If the property continues to generate a nice cash flow, it might be the early retirement helper everyone dreams of. Fingers crossed!

What’s your favorite form of passive income?

The post Our Rental Property – The First Year appeared first on RidinKulous.