{ "item_title" : "Should I Keep It?", "item_author" : [" Nell Prescott "], "item_description" : "Nobody handed you a manual with the keys.Maybe your mother died and left you the house you grew up in. Maybe the job moved to another state and you could not bring yourself to give up a 2.9 percent mortgage. Maybe it came out of a divorce, or the sale fell through twice and you thought, we will just rent it for a year.However you got here, you are a landlord now, and you never applied for the job.So you did what everyone does. You searched should I rent out my house or sell it at eleven at night and got a forum thread about cost segregation studies, a podcast about a man with forty-one doors, and a blog post that turned out to be an ad. None of it was written for someone with one house and a lot of feelings about it.This book is.Should I Keep It? is the guide for accidental landlords - the people who inherited a property, relocated and kept the house, or ended up renting one out because selling did not work. It starts where every other book skips: with whether you should be doing this at all.It is the only book in this category willing to tell you to sell. Chapter 3 walks you through the real arithmetic, including two things almost nobody explains: that an inherited house sold soon after a death can be close to tax-free because of stepped-up basis, and that renting out your former home can quietly run out the clock on the Section 121 capital gains exclusion - which means renting is often the less reversible choice, not the safe one.Then, if you keep it, it teaches you the minimum competent version of the job. Not a real estate career. The version that protects you, treats your tenant decently, and takes about four hours a month.Inside: The honest annual number - why the rent covers the mortgage is the most expensive sentence in this business, worked out line by lineA keep-or-sell decision tree that is genuinely willing to end in sellThe Ten Questions you need answered about your own state's landlord-tenant law, and exactly where to find the answers for freeTenant screening that is both fair-housing-safe and actually protective, including the reference call script and the one question that worksWhat to do about the house still full of your mother's things, and about the sibling who will not answer the phoneThe insurance policy you probably have wrong right now, and a nine-question call script to fix it in twenty minutesDepreciation, Schedule E, and why skipping depreciation to avoid recapture does not workFive word-for-word scripts for late rent, payment plans, rent increases, and non-renewalWhen to hire a property manager, when to sell, and how to know whichWarm, funny, specific, and unsentimental about money. Written by someone who did most of it wrong first and says so.You will finish this book as one of two people: a small landlord who knows what they are doing, or someone who sold a house cleanly and on purpose. Both of those count.This book provides general information and one owner's experience. It is not legal, tax, or financial advice. Landlord-tenant law is state and local law and it changes - the book teaches you how to find your own current rules.", "item_img_path" : "https://covers3.booksamillion.com/covers/bam/9/79/819/222/9798192222874_b.jpg", "price_data" : { "retail_price" : "14.95", "online_price" : "14.95", "our_price" : "14.95", "club_price" : "14.95", "savings_pct" : "0", "savings_amt" : "0.00", "club_savings_pct" : "0", "club_savings_amt" : "0.00", "discount_pct" : "10", "store_price" : "" } }

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