The Complete Site Guide

Overview

What The Ledger does: you enter your rental properties once — purchase price, current market value, mortgage details, rent, and expenses — and it projects 30 years forward, showing exactly what happens to your cash flow, equity, and income as time passes.

Two strategies it models, side by side:

• Refi & Reinvest (the default): as each property builds equity, the model refinances it, pulls the cash out, and uses it as a down payment on the next property. That next property adds its own rent and its own equity, which eventually funds another purchase. This compounding loop is what the homepage calls “Refi. Reinvest. Repeat.”
• Pay It Off (the alternative): instead of buying more properties, you send your cash flow at your existing mortgages instead — paying them down faster, freeing up each loan’s payment for the next one, until you’re debt-free.

Both strategies run on the same underlying math. You can switch between them, or run neither and just track your portfolio as-is.

The core question it answers: “What year does my rental income replace my paycheck?” You set an income goal (e.g. $6,000/mo), and the model shows the year your projected cash flow crosses it — the Goal Year.

Seven tabs, each covering one piece of the picture: Dashboard, Portfolio, Projections, Depreciation, Stress Test, Refi & Growth, and Pay It Off. The rest of this guide covers each one.

Tab 1 — Dashboard

The one-glance summary of where your portfolio stands today — not projected, not averaged, just right now.

KPI strip (top of every page): Active Properties, Portfolio Value, Total Equity, Mortgage Balance, Annual Rent, Net Cash Flow/Yr, Cap Rate, Portfolio DSCR. Defined in the Glossary below.

Income Goal card: set a monthly dollar figure — the income that would let you walk away from a job. The card shows:

• Current Rental Income — today’s total net cash flow across all active properties, per month
• Paycheck Replaced — current income divided by your goal, as a percentage
• Goal Year — the calendar year your projected cash flow first reaches the goal, recalculated live as you add properties or change assumptions. This is the single number the whole product is built around.

Ready to Deploy card: shows any property that has crossed your refi equity threshold today, and how much cash-out it’s ready to produce. Hidden if Pay It Off is turned on, since refinancing pauses in that mode.

Portfolio Snapshot & Trajectory: a compact restatement of today’s numbers, plus a 30-year chart of equity and cash flow. This is where you see the compounding curve, not just a single point in time.

Holdings cards: one card per active property, each showing its own market value, equity, cap rate, and net cash flow — a quick per-property comparison.

Tab 2 — Portfolio

Where you enter and edit every property. This is the source of truth — every other tab’s numbers come from what’s entered here.

Adding a property: click “+ Add Property,” then fill in each field. Every dollar field is click-to-edit — click in, type, click away, and it saves automatically to your account after a short pause.

Show/Hide Columns: toggle which columns are visible — useful since the full table has over 20 columns (Rate, Term, Payment, Management Fee, Tax, Insurance, Maintenance, Rent, Net Rent, Equity, LTV, Cap Rate, DSCR, Net Cash Flow, and more). Drag horizontally to see columns that don’t fit on screen.

Refi? and Payoff? columns: per-property switches. Set Refi? to Exclude to keep a specific property out of the refinance engine entirely (it never gets flagged for cash-out, no matter its equity). Set Payoff? to Exclude to keep a property on its normal minimum payment schedule even when the Pay It Off plan is running — its rent and payment still count toward your cash flow, it just never gets extra principal.

Global Settings & Key Metrics panels: vacancy and credit-loss assumptions (applied portfolio-wide), plus a rollup of totals — total equity, weighted average mortgage rate, total mortgage payments per year, and more.

Tab 3 — Projections

Every year from now through 2055, for every property and the portfolio total.

Year chips: click any year to see that year’s snapshot — rate, purchase price, invested capital, market value, equity, LTV, mortgage balance, and principal paid, per property, for that specific year. Properties that haven’t been acquired yet (future reinvestment purchases) simply don’t appear until their year arrives.

Portfolio Totals by Year table: the same year-by-year view, but summed across the whole portfolio — market value, equity, mortgage balance, annual rent, annual net cash flow, cumulative net cash flow, refis that year, and refi cash-out, all in one scrollable table.

Growth Assumptions panel: the rent increase, appreciation, and opex increase rates driving every projection. These apply portfolio-wide and compound every year.

Portfolio Trajectory chart & Holdings cards: the same 30-year chart and per-property cards seen on the Dashboard, repeated here for convenience.

Tab 4 — Depreciation

Tracks the IRS straight-line depreciation schedule for your rental properties — a paper loss that can offset taxable rental income without costing you any actual cash.

How it works: each property’s purchase price minus its land value (land isn’t depreciable) becomes its depreciable basis. That basis is spread evenly over 27.5 years — the standard IRS schedule for residential rental property.

Default Land Value %: applied to any property without a manually entered land value. Override it per-property on the Portfolio tab if you know the actual land/building split from a tax assessment.

By Property table: each property’s basis, annual depreciation amount, accumulated depreciation to date, and remaining basis.

Portfolio Depreciation by Year chart: total depreciation across all properties, by year — it ramps up as you acquire more properties and tapers off as older properties finish their 27.5-year schedule.

Tab 5 — Stress Test

Answers: “if things got worse, which properties would still hold up?” — before a bad year actually happens.

Scenario Assumptions: three preset severities — Mild (−5% rent), Moderate (−10% rent), Severe (−20% rent), each also raising vacancy and adding a rate shock.

Debt Service Coverage Ratio table: shows each property’s DSCR under normal conditions and under all three stress scenarios, plus a Breakeven Vacancy % — the vacancy rate at which that property’s cash flow hits exactly zero. Color-coded: green (healthy, ≥ 1.25), amber (caution, 1.00–1.24), red (distress, below 1.00).

Net Cash Flow Under Stress table: the same idea in dollar terms — each property’s actual monthly cash flow under each scenario, plus the dollar and percent change versus baseline.

This tab doesn’t change anything about your portfolio — it’s purely informational, a way to see your margin of safety before you need it.

Tab 6 — Refi & Growth

Models the refinance-and-reinvest flywheel: the mechanism that makes a portfolio grow faster than rent increases alone.

The refi trigger: every property is checked against your refi equity threshold (default 50%). The moment a property’s equity ratio — (market value − balance) ÷ market value — crosses that threshold, it becomes eligible for a refinance. This check runs regardless of anything else; refinancing itself is never “off” unless the Pay It Off plan is running.

Cash-out amount: when a property refinances, the new loan is sized to your keep-equity percentage (default 80% LTV, i.e. keep 20% equity) applied to the current market value. The cash-out is the difference between that new loan amount and the old balance.

Refi Action Queue (Dashboard banner): shows which property is next in line today, sorted by priority, and exactly how much cash-out it’s ready to generate.

“This Year” view: pick any year and see that year’s Net Cash Flow, and “Where This Year’s Cash Went” — every dollar (refi cash-out plus rental cash flow, combined) landing in one of three places: Reinvested into a new property, Taken Out Personally, or Added to Reserve.

Take refinance cash out personally (toggle): refinancing keeps happening automatically regardless of this setting — it only decides what happens to the cash-out. Off (default): cash-out funds a new property purchase. On: cash-out is paid to you instead, tracked with a this-year total and a running total. This is the same underlying setting as “Reinvest refinance cash-out into new properties” in the settings panel, just presented with its own clear switch and totals.

Upcoming Purchases: when a refi (or pooled cash flow) funds a new property, it appears here with the price, down payment, and rent left blank — deliberately. The model won’t guess your real purchase numbers; you fill them in once the deal is real.

History & Detail: the full record. Sometimes a single refi or a single year’s rental cash flow isn’t quite enough on its own to fund a whole new down payment — when that happens, the leftover is kept in a running pool (tracked separately for refi cash-out and rental cash flow) and carried forward until it’s large enough. The Purchase Ledger here lists every reinvestment purchase in the order it happened, showing exactly what was drawn from each pool and what was left over right after — a direct paper trail if a number anywhere else ever looks off. Below it, two yearly tables break refi cash-out and rental cash flow down separately, year by year.

Refi & Reinvestment Settings (gear icon): the underlying assumptions — equity threshold, keep-equity percentage, whether to reinvest cash-out and/or yearly cash flow, and the reinvestment down-payment percentage.

Tab 7 — Pay It Off

The alternative to reinvesting: instead of buying more properties, send your cash flow at your existing mortgages.

Which loan first: three strategies — Cash-Flow First (targets the loan that frees the most monthly payment per dollar of balance — usually the fastest route to higher income), Smallest Balance (quick wins), Highest Rate (minimizes total interest paid).

Cash flow sent to mortgages: a slider, 0–100%, for how much of your monthly positive cash flow goes to extra principal. You can also add a fixed dollar amount per month from outside income.

KPI row: Debt-Free In, Interest Saved (versus minimum payments), Monthly Cash Flow Once Debt-Free, and how long until you reach your income goal under this plan.

Cash flow by year: your monthly cash flow at years 5, 10, 15, and 30, compared against what minimum payments alone would produce.

Payoff order & Compare payoff orders: the exact sequence properties get paid off in, and a side-by-side of all three strategies — debt-free date, total interest, and cash flow at each milestone year.

Include this plan in Dashboard and Projections (switch): off by default — the tab is just a planning sandbox until you flip this on. Once on, your Goal Year and every yearly projection run this plan instead of the refi engine. Refinancing and reinvestment pause automatically while this is on — the two strategies never mix by accident. A banner appears on every affected tab so it’s never a surprise, with a one-click way to turn it back off.

Per-property exclusion: set a property’s Payoff? column (on the Portfolio tab) to Exclude to keep it on its normal minimum-payment schedule — useful if you want to leave one property’s mortgage alone while paying down the rest.

Glossary

FAQ & Common Gotchas