Institutional vs Individual Ownership of Rental Properties

Most single family and 2-4 unit rentals are owned by individuals rather than businesses.

I found the New York Times article "Mom and Pop Own Fewer Rental Units" from last summer and they had data for 2001 and 2015.    Here's a graphic from that article :

Source: New York Times

The chart shows the % of each rental size category that is owned by an "institutional investor".   
They list the 2015 Rental Housing Finance Survey as their source for the numbers.    Looking further into that data I find that they break down ownership into categories of "Individual Investor" and several different kind of business entities.   The lists includes : Trustee for estate,    LLP, LP or LLC ,    Tenant in common,    General partnership,    Real Estate Investment Trust (REIT), Real estate corporation,   Housing cooperative organization, Nonprofit organization,Other and Not reported.     I'm not sure how they split it up.    Its unclear how they decided which of those categories are "institutional investors" and which aren't.    For example an LLC might be some big hedge fund or it might be an individual.   In any case if we just look at the "Individual Investors" and then assume that anything else isn't an individual we still see that most properties in the  1-4 unit size are owned by individuals.


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My Marginal Tax Rates 1997 - 2018

I've been employed for the past 21 years with a healthy salary.    Over that time my base salary has gone up about 5% annually in total.    It grew faster in the first 10 years then the raises slowed down as I peaked within my job role.    At the same time my marginal tax rates have gone down.

Here is the plot of my personal federal income tax marginal tax rate :

I got the marginal tax rates from the information at the Tax Foundation up to 2013 and at Moneychimp after that


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PSA : Amex Blue Does NOT Count Fred Meyer as Groceries

The American Express Blue Cash Preferred card has a nice 6% cash back reward for groceries.     The card carries a $95 annual fee but if you use it for groceries this can more than pay for the annual fee.   Except at Fred Meyer...

Amex Blue does not register Fred Meyer as a Grocery and thus you don't get 6% back from Fred Meyer purchases.    This is true even if you buy only groceries at Freddy's.

I just wanted to put this out there in case I can help keep someone else from making the same mistake as me by assuming Freddy's would count as grocery.

I'm not sure but I would assume that all Amex don't report Fred Meyer as grocery, not just the Blue cards.   But the Blue cards are the ones that have extra cash back for grocery as far as I know.


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Hulu + HBO for $13 for 6 months plus possible $15 cash from Ebates

Hulu is currently running a discount deal to add HBO for just $5 per month for 6 months.     You can add that to the $8 basic Hulu subscription for a total of $13 per month for both Hulu and HBO.    Thats a $2 monthly savings versus HBO Now alone and you get Hulu for free. 

Here's the link with the info on the Hulu deal

On top of that if you're a new Hulu subscriber you can also get $15 cash back via Ebates for signing up for Hulu.



Standard Ebates blurb: To get cash back from Ebates you need to be signed up with Ebates.  Then simply go to Ebates to get the referral to the store before you do your shopping.  I also get a referral bonus if you use my links to sign up with Ebates.  

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