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I plan on using the Step Up in Basis that allows me to pay no taxes on my property on the death of either myself or my spouse, whichever occurs first.
I was unaware of this. If properties are in both of our names & one dies - the living person get the step up?
Very interesting thread! We "spoke" on here years ago when we were first starting and had a very uninformed hunch that rentals were our way forward after successful careers, but self employed with nothing for the future but what we'd saved & invested.
We retired to a small town and wanted to keep things local & easy - but that means not too many multi family properties available so we've had to make do. We started in 2015 with a 4-plex and still have that plus 2 duplexes, 1 SFH with a rentable garage apartment, 9 SFH, 1 building that houses our "office", extra appliances, tools, etc. and has a fully furnished apartment in half of it. 20 doors. All cash purchases. We will recoup all of our invested money in the next 10 months from tenant rents. There is not a single one of them that has not increased a substantial amount in value - most are in cute historic districts. When we started, we paid as little as $15K for one - we did a lot of the reno work ourselves on all of them to make them higher end & to compete with newer apartments.
Your plan has worked for us, but we probably need to fine tune our exit strategy since we are 57&67. Our initial plan was to sell one a year if we needed the money - but I can't see that happening. We did sell one to a tenant that wanted it & we owner financed. We bought it with them in it and it needed tons of renovation if we'd kept it, they are a nice young couple that rented for 5 years from us never late on rent so it helped them out & relieved us of a bunch of expense & work.
We are also pretty heavily invested in the stock market. That has done really well, but having equity in these properties, for us, is still the better deal.
Maybe some day we can meet in Bryan for that cup of coffee or lunch. That's my home town though we don't get there too often anymore.