Which parcel was the mowing bill for? I could not tell her.
I hold six raw parcels, all in one county, all bought over about nine years. Two are farmed on a handshake lease, one has a billboard easement, the rest just sit there and cost me mowing and taxes. Up until this spring my whole system was one checking account and a shoebox, and honestly it worked fine as long as I was the only person who ever needed to understand it.
Then I started thinking about selling the two smallest, and I wanted real numbers on what each one had cost me to carry. So I hired somebody who advertises books for land investors specifically.
First call, she asked which parcel a $412 check was for. I said mowing. She said yes, which parcel. I didn't know. Second call, same thing, forty times. She would not accept "county taxes" as a category. Every single line had to land on a parcel or she wouldn't post it.
What came out of that was worse than I expected. I had been paying taxes on a parcel I sold in 2021 for two more cycles because the bill kept coming and I kept paying it. Nobody caught it, including me, because it was one line in a stack of similar lines. The other thing was that one parcel, the one I assumed was my quietest hold, had eaten about 60 percent of all the mowing and brush clearing I paid for across nine years.
She also raised a question about which of those carrying costs get capitalized into basis versus expensed, and told me flatly that answer belongs to a CPA, not her. Fair enough. I found one.
She printed a plat map and taped it over her desk. She sends me a photo of it sometimes with notes on it.