I am curious as to how many regular posters here are full time landlords. I define full time landlord as when your monthly rents are at least 75% or greater of your total yearly income. Being a full time landlord is your only "day job" and when rents are due, your brain becomes highly focused on collecting all the rents that are due that month. Rents are what keep your boat from sinking.

It's fun to think I could be a full time landlord if I trimmed my lifestyle a bit. But then again, what would I do to keep myself busy during the day? I spend about 3-5 hours per week managing the rentals. Everything else is hired out.

I have enough liquid cash in after-tax retirement accounts to supplement my monthly budget for about 10 years if only 50% of my rents come in. Once those funds ran out, I could sell 2 units per year and create enough income to last another 22 years even with no rent coming in at all from any of the remaining units.

So... I've got at least 33 years worth of income already in the kitty. I'd have more if I were diligent and kept my rent collection where it is today at 97%. I'm 49 years old today and would be in my early-80s by the time it all ran dry if I was lazy and just sat on my butt 24/7/365. That's also considering I don't apply for any Govt bennies, unemployment, low-income, etc. Some of that you still qualify for if it's income-based and not wealth-based.

All that said, do you think I'd qualify as a FT landlord if I quit my job today?

We've been FT for decades. 100% supported by the rents. It's not passive income, it's our job: we do NOT hire everything out and even when we do hire something out, we oversee the work.

I do the office work, the paperwork, the taxes, etc. He does the handyman stuff and dealing with the contractors.

I have been a full time LL since January of '19. Not the best day of my life (I have a couple kids after all), but man, was it a great day!

The IT job that I had been working for the past 7 years had a company wide layoff and my number was up. I found out about the layoff the night before and I had a good hunch that I wouldn't survive. I stayed late that night and got most of my stuff out of my office. When my hunch turned out to be true, I guarantee you that I was probably the only one that day that walked out with a smile on my face.

I had been planning to leave on my own, but I needed a couple things to happen first. Because these couple things hadn't come to fruition yet, I did initially try to interview and find another job in IT. EVERY phone interview I had I couldn't help but think, "I really don't want this job." My mentors immediately started hammering me over the head asking why I was even interviewing. So, eventually I came to the conclusion that I should at least give it a try. I put my severance check in the savings account and promised myself that if even a penny of it got touched, I would go back to work. Here we are 6 years later and I can only kick myself for not going self employed sooner! Haha!

My friends were jealous of course. I just reminded them that I worked 2 jobs for 20 years so that I could work 1/2 a job for the next 20+ years. The FREEDOM it has opened up cannot totally be described. One of my kids has grown up and lives out of state now. When she is back and calls to let me know, I just let my admin (Yes! I even have an admin now!) know to cancel the rest of my day and call me if anything important comes up. The day belongs to my kid then. There's NO WAY that would have happened working my IT job.

Anyway, I digress. To answer your question Roy, yes. The income is higher, the income is limitless (not just a 3% increase every year like the corporate world), the schedule is controlled by me, I travel way more, etc. It was scary at first, but SO glad my mentors got through to me and I ended up going this route!

Sid,

WMH,

I'm a business owner with real estate being one business I operate. The other one is my accounting firm.It's a pretty good setup as I completely control my time. The idea was to create a more passive income stream for retirement and to slowly reduce the accounting practice. I basically work both part time. Real estate takes 3-5 weekly. Accounting requires around 30 hours a week during tax season and 20 hours or less during the off season. I consider myself partially retired and will continue in this mode as long as I remain healthy. Generally, I hire out most of the real estate stuff save for the simplest things.

I've been always a Real Estate Professional, spending a least 750 hours per year working with properties that I own at least 10% of. This rule allows me to deduct ALL REAL ESTATE LOSSES FROM MY JOB'S INCOME, a contractor.

I use example tax year 2006, where I made over $1,000,000 in rental income, and left over profits from flips and sales that I did not re-invest in a 1031 exchange. My Taxes in California and Federal would have exceeded $400,000. But instead of blowing 40% of my profits, I did the following maintenance:

This is my only source of income, minus $75 I get annually from serving on the planning board and a retirement that I get from my first job. I put in a solid 25-40 hours a week. It really depends on how I feel and what I have in my pipeline.

Full time since 2005 .... Left my mega corp gig Oct 2005.

I guess by your definition I'm not full time as 75% of my yearly income is not from rental income alone, even though rentals produce way over 100% of my annual living expenses.

By your 75% criteria I am not a full time landlord but I haven't worked for anyone else in 15 years. I have a couple of other ventures that have done pretty well so my landlord percentage has dropped. When I started I also had a W2 job.

I feel like I am too young to just manage the real estate. I suppose I could though without any significant change in lifestyle.

I bought my first property in 1978. I married in 1986 and have been a FT LL since 1987. Prior to that, I worked FT for a company while also being a LL 24/7. My husband continued to work a company job; I left mine to do everything in real estate. After work and weekends, we went to whatever property needed renovating. We hired out the big stuff, i.e., roofs, and HVAC. Well, wait. One weekend, we had a race, each installing a side of our garage roof.

Purchased the first rental in 2001. I had a full time W2, wife was taking care of the kids.

Wife got a job as an aide at the school. That worked out as she was always off when the kids were.

We kept collecting dumps and fixing them up nights and weekends.

My W2 shut down the facility in 2012 and offered me positions with sister places all over. Wife was offered a FT position at her W2 in admin. She is still there.

We decided that I would just focus on the rentals and not go back to a W2. I hated it there, but this was the kick in the backside that I needed. I supplemented the income loss by working for realtors and such as a handyman type person.

Couldn't get anything done for myself so I stopped doing that about four years ago. When I had the W2 we just used all the profits from the rentals by paying down or buying new.

Scary for a few months because I worried a lot.

Happy I did it.

Her W2 is making about 2/3 of what mine did back in 2012. She likes the job (most days) and has insurance. She does nearly nothing with the rentals themselves but does the books.

If I would stop buying junky places to fix up I would not be that busy. The rentals are paying the bills. We could stop her W2 and make some adjustments to live without that money and benny package. But while she likes it she will stay.

Roy,

Good observation and good question. Here goes.

First, I didn't create my resume simply to brag or impress. There are certainly many more impressive folks here than me who are many times wealthier than I am. We could just as easily ask them the same question about why they don't sell all their rentals and live the good life away from tenants and toilets?

I already answered the question in my original post. Here it is again in case it got lost in the shuffle: "But then again, what would I do to keep myself busy during the day? I spend about 3-5 hours per week managing the rentals."

I am not a FT landlord like you. I do not swing my own hammers or paint brushes. So, if I were to quit the day job, how would I fill my hours? It takes me minimal time to manage my rentals. Why would I trade a job working for an employer I like that gives me interesting work to do, good benefits, and stable income just to get more tenants telling me what a "F-ing slumlord" when I evict them for non-payment?

Okay, I'm kidding a little, but really there's a point when you have to decide, "What will more wealth really DO for me?"

Can I spend more? Sure, you can always spend more.

Will I enjoy having more? Eh... maybe. Lots of wealth puts a target on your butt. It also limits one's social circle. Not by choice, but a guy with 500 rentals doesn't have as much in common with a guy who has 50 rentals, and likewise that guy doesn't have as much in common with a guy who has zero rentals.

Have you ever noticed that as your wealth and overall life success increases, some people who used to be part of your inner circle drift away? I've had it happen. I try to stay in contact, but we don't move within the same orbits any more. I have times and freedoms they don't have. It's just the way the world works, sometimes. I try not to get "too big for my britches", but sometimes... the other person feels too small in their own britches in spite of my best efforts and becomes distant.

Too, you know me: if I got 100 more units, I just hire it all done and probably hire a bookkeeper and property manager as well. Even if I didn't, it wouldn't take up THAT much more time. If I can manage 54 units in 3-5 hours/week, 100 more units would still be a part-time job. Maybe 10 hours a week? Now I've got 30 more hours to figure out how to stay out of (too much) trouble! I'd probably hang out at the pub, swill more beer and get chunkier!

I heard a wise man once say, "When you quit something, don't do it because you're running away from something bad; do it because you're running towards something good." I haven't figured out yet what the "something good" would be. Any ideas?

Hope that answers your question. Btw, the reason I DID bang out that "resume" was partly for my own edification. When you asked about being a FT landlord, I thought, "Huh, could I do that, and if so... what would it look like?"

Wow @Doogie [KS]… Your story sounds almost exactly like mine. Congrats for getting fired!

I was also planning to leave my software engineering job at the end of 2024. I love engineering, but hated my specific job (and boss) the last few years. I'll be 49 next month and my goal was before 50.

The "things that had to happen first" were all on track for that to happen. I took a vacation to Bali with my wife for her birthday in early September, went back to work September 16th, and was fired (along with 43 other people) by noon that first day back.

I was a little nervous because of those things that were supposed to happen that last three months were not done yet, BUT it turned out that my severance package left me with significantly more money than I would have made if I worked those last three months then quit! Plus free time and free health insurance for a period of time. The way I thought of it is I got paid to leave early. That solved a number of obstacles.

As of 9/16/2024, I'm happy to say I'm a FULL TIME LANDLORD!

Had I not been fired, I would have probably chickened out and still be miserable working at a job I hated. Thankfully, they made the decision for me.

So getting fired was the best thing that could happen to me!

Had the factory not shut down I would have been there longer, and more miserable by the day.

They did me a favor by shutting it down as well.