Financial advice on the beginner's life situation

[Daniel Barkov]

Hi, first of all, thanks BiggerPockets for creating such a nice platform. It's been amazing so far! 

I'll try to keep it short, but I need someone's experienced advice. I live in Spartanburg, SC, and been thinking about investing in real estate, but wanted to get more capital first. I'm 23 y/o guy, working as a diesel mechanic, I'm making about 50k a year from this and also I'm flipping cars on the side that makes me around 20k a year as well. My wife doesn't work. Last year we bought our primary residence. 

I have two routes to choose, and I need an advice. My end game plan is to have 4-5 rental units that's paid off and that's will be my retirement. I don't want to make millions, but I want to have enough to be able to travel with my wife and being able to raise kids and spend time with them (we don't have any yet but planning in the future). When I'll sell my assets that I'm planning on selling this/next year (sport car, two boats, one of the pickup trucks) I'll have roughly 60k cash on hands.

1 route - buy an old automotive shop and open an automotive repair facility and/or car dealership. Since I'm good with cars and that's what I'm enjoying doing. I'm thinking buying it for 80k-120k, putting around $20-25k on rehab and spend the leftover savings on equipment and starting the business. That should bump up my income in future 2-3 years and make me being able to afford bigger loans and have income to invest in rentals 

2 route - keep my diesel mechanic 9to5 job (that just covers my current bills and living expenses) and try to invest with 60k I have right now. Also if I'll be buying real estate I won't have enough time for flipping cars and making another $20k a year. 

I'm having a mortgage already and my max loan I can take on my current income is 100k. I was thinking to possibly start with cheaper run-down houses, in a $100k range, spend $20-30k on down payment, closing costs, etc, and spend the rest $30k on rehab. But that leaves me with no money for emergency, plus we all know that rehab always takes more, and you always have to have safety net for rent emergencies. 

Experienced BiggerPockets investors, which route will be better in my position? I didn't have anyone in my life to mentor me in financials, and I can't have any help from my family or friends. 

[Bryce Jamison]

There's a lot going on here, so I'm going to give some general, broad advise based on your post. To get a thorough, in depth answer though I'd recommend finding other local investors and get their opinion. Your question deserves a conversation, a long one. There's tons of post on here about where to find meetups and other like minded individuals, so I won't go into that here.

A few things jump out to me immediately. 

Why isn't your wife working if you don't have kids? Unless there's a reason, I would think you'd want her to work to achieve your shared goals. Which brings me to my next few points...

Is she on board with this? Does she share this goals? If not, have that conversation.

I'd encourage you to prioritize getting that income up, way up. $70K is great at your age, but I want you much higher, like 200K household income, ASAP. Easier said then done I know, but you'll get a much higher, and faster, ROI getting a raise compared to putting 100K into something that net's a few hundred in cash flow a month for example.

Your idea of 4-5 paid off properties sounds great based off of today's climate, but it won't sustain you your entire life. Your rent might keep up with inflation and increased taxes to allow you to keep your current life style, but what about when you get older and need healthcare? Will it be enough to cover health insurance. Will it be enough to pay for potential future kids? If you think you'll need 5K a month to survive aim for 10K, or 15K. Try and build up the "passive" income so every so often you can add another property to the mix to increase your profits and keep up with your higher income needs as you age.

Finally, I never like A or B choices. Let's look at options C-Z too. There's probably a better option that we haven't considered.