Negative cash flow doesn't disappear all at once. It slowly leaks out through small maintenance decisions that you barely notice at the time.

Material choice here, a delayed repair there, a system you stopped paying attention to because it's working fine, but then years later you're dealing with higher cost, more hassle, and cash flow that never seems to stabilize.

In this episode, we're talking about the hidden maintenance mistakes that quietly kill cash flow

and what experienced landlords do differently to prevent them.

And to help me on today's topic, I've invited Matt Hawkins from New Hampshire,

who is one of the sharpest landlords I know and who also has one of the best beards,

which is why we call him the lumberjack landlord.

So let's get right to our

conversation.

If we haven't met yet, my name is Chad Carson. You can also call me Coach Carson. And on this

channel, I teach you how to use a small and mighty style of real estate investing to achieve financial freedom so you can spend your time doing more of what matters.

So, Matt, I want to talk about the topic that you and I love nerding out on, but a lot of people, including the earlier version of myself, ignored this topic of maintenance.

And I paid for it.

I paid for it a big way because when you ignore maintenance,

I believe, and I've found that it then cost you a ton later on because it eats all your cash flow

when you ignore it on the front end. So I love to start. We're going to get some systems and kind of

the way you and I approach this with our properties now and how we've hopefully improved.

But I'm wondering, do you have any stories from your earlier version of Matt as a landlord where you did that? I've got my own stories too. I want to share where you ignore some maintenance and it ended up costing you, biting you in the butt later on? Only 300, but I'll pick the best one. Yeah, pick a good one. We could make this a marathon and go on for weeks on end

on the mistakes I think we both made in the beginning. But that's why we're here. So probably

the worst mistake that was ever made. Thankfully, the worst one, I only had to pay a portion

of it, but it was a larger building. Had five different heating systems. It was in the lease that the tenant had a contract to do the changing of the filters

and the, every six months and actually have the system serviced once a year.

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