There’s One Unpleasant Thing About Real Estate Investments – To Make Money You Have To Be A Person With Money

Someone might be reading this now and thinking:
“Yeah, obviously — you buy a property, maybe renovate it, that costs money.”
But that’s not what I mean.

Originally, I wrote a long post covering many aspects of flips and rentals —
and then I remembered it’s 2026…
who even reads long posts anymore?!
So let’s get straight to the point.

I’ll use a rental deal as an example for simplicity,
but this applies just as much to flips, multifamily, new construction, and more.

Rental – Purchase + Renovation

Here you can do a BRRRR, take a DSCR loan (with ~30% down),
or use any other solution if you don’t have enough cash to buy without leverage.

Rental – Ongoing Ownership & Maintenance

And this is the real reason I’m writing this post.

I often meet investors who think:
“I’ll put X amount of money into a rental property — and that’s it! No more worries.”

Well… that’s not how it works.

If you want to avoid selling the property at a loss later
(and selling a house is pretty expensive),
you need money available for every possible event.

Here’s a real-life example:

I had a house that was fully renovated and basically brand new.
In January, a family moved in — and… the furnace stopped working.

This system had worked perfectly for months,
had been checked, tested, and repaired from every angle,
and was only a few years old.
And yet — in their very first week, it died.

At the same time, the electric heater I had just bought
started acting up and constantly short-circuiting.
Of course, this had to happen exactly when the tenants moved in 😂

After several diagnostic checks,
the issue was finally found — an electrical problem that hadn’t been detected before.

I won’t bore you with the technical details,
but long story short — it cost me $1,500.
And I hadn’t seen a single dollar of rent yet.

In another property,
I had to build a fence that wasn’t planned at all,
due to problematic neighbors
(a few thousand dollars — no big deal 🙃).

And in a different house,
there was an unplanned flood in the crawl space
because the sump pump stopped working —
and that cost me more than I’d like to think about.

So what am I really trying to say here?

When you own a house — there are expenses.
Some of them happen before you collect rent
or even before the first year is over.

Can you make money from rentals in the U.S.?
Absolutely. I do.

But it’s not a situation of:
“I renovated, placed a tenant, everything works — bye.”

There is ongoing maintenance,
and you need money for repairs
(whether from accumulated rent or from another source)
so the property can continue functioning properly.

That’s it for today, friends!

Next post:
Post #3: There’s a lot of uncertainty…
but what if I just jump into the water anyway?!
Worst case — I pay the price of the mistake.