u/TurboMango88

I'm 46 and own a handful of rental properties that have done well over the years. The cash flow is solid and I don't have any major complaints, but I'd like to keep growing without necessarily buying another rental every time I have capital available.

I've been researching how to start a lending business, mainly by making private loans on real estate deals. The returns seem attractive, but the more I read, the more it sounds like successful lenders spend a lot of time sourcing deals, underwriting borrowers, and managing risk. It definitely looks more hands-on than I expected.

For those of you who own rentals and also do private lending, did you build everything yourself, or did you invest alongside an experienced lending team that handled the deal sourcing and underwriting? I'm curious how people make it work without turning it into another full time job.

Our admin rolled out a new phone policy this year, basically zero tolerance, phones get confiscated and held in the office until a parent picks them up if a student is caught using one during class. On paper it sounds great, less distraction, more engagement, all that. In practice it's been a mixed bag.

Some kids have genuinely adjusted and seem more present in class. Others have just gotten more creative about hiding them, or it's turned into a constant power struggle that eats into actual teaching time when I have to stop and deal with it.

Curious how other schools are handling this. Is your policy strict like ours, more lenient, or somewhere in between? And honestly, has it made a real difference in engagement or behavior, or is it mostly just shifting the problem somewhere else?

Private money lending has been coming up a lot in conversations with my family lately. We’re at a point where we don’t really have the time to manage more rentals, but we still have some capital sitting in low single digit returns from cash and other conservative holdings. On paper, private lending seems like a more efficient way to put that capital to work compared to buying more properties, especially since it avoids tenants, maintenance, and day-to-day management. But the more I look into it, the more I realize there’s a real learning curve involved. I’m mainly trying to understand how realistic this is for smaller, individual investors. Is it actually doable to source and properly vet deals without institutional-level experience, or does that gap in expertise make it riskier than it first appears? I’ve also seen return expectations that look attractive, but I’m trying to figure out what that looks like in practice once you account for defaults, underwriting skill, and deal access. For those who are actively doing both rentals and private lending, how has that balance worked out for you in reality?