Cap rate, real cash flow, and return on the cash you put in — including the expenses most analyses leave out. Estimate only, not investment advice.
Estimates only — not investment, tax, or legal advice. How we calculate every figure
Estimated all-in monthly payment for a home price you have in mind.
What homeowners insurance costs in your state, and whether what you pay is out of line.
Income, savings, and debts in — max home price and qualification signal out.
A rental bought for $300,000 and sold seven years later for $394,780 nets $158,925 at closing — and owes about $24,753 of federal tax, $15,273 of it on depreciation you were required to take. Here is the math, why a sale with zero appreciation still owes tax, and the three clocks a fourth-quarter sale starts.
A leveraged rental makes money three ways and cash flow is only one of them. Here is what the other two are worth — and why the structure that maximises them is a bet, not a plan.
How to verify one specific rental deal: audit the seller's pro-forma line by line, comp a real rent, reassess the tax, age the systems, and price the offer the numbers actually support.
Set up basis correctly, claim the depreciation you are owed, survive the passive-loss rules, and know what the sale will cost — with every figure tied to the statute.
Nebraska guide
There is a comfortable assumption behind a lot of Midwest rental investing: that the expensive-insurance problem is a coastal problem, and that a landlocked state is a state where you can price the mortgage, add a modest premium, and move on.
Nebraska is the cleanest counterexample in the country. The average Nebraska homeowners premium is $5,037 a year at $300,000 of dwelling coverage — roughly 1.75 times the $2,872 national average at that identical tier, and the second-highest figure in Insurance.com's 50-state table behind only Florida. There is no coast, no hurricane, no earthquake, no wildfire crisis. There is hail, and hail alone is enough.
Then Nebraska does something no coastal state does. It pairs that premium with an effective property tax rate of 1.44%, among the highest in the nation. Most expensive-insurance states are low-tax states, and most high-tax states are cheap to insure. Nebraska is expensive on both lines at once, which is the actual finding of this article.
And behind all of it: Nebraska has no FAIR Plan. No windstorm pool, no state insurer of last resort of any kind. If your carrier non-renews you after a hail claim, the standard advice — go to the state plan — does not exist here.
A note before you start: this is general educational information about how rental property arithmetic works in Nebraska. It is not investment, tax, insurance, or legal advice, and it is not a recommendation about any property. Nebraska insurance is priced per structure — roof age and roof material in particular move it enormously — and property tax is administered county by county and district by district. Talk to a Nebraska CPA about tax treatment, a licensed Nebraska agent about a real quote, and a Nebraska attorney about anything contractual.
Read the full Nebraska guide →18 min read · Updated 2026-08-28