Financial Independence via Real Estate

[Brian Cook]

Hi all,

My name is Brian and I've been lurking around on these forums for about a week. I'm currently 25 years old and am making about ~130k in my day job. I'm located in New England. I guess my question to you all that have experience with real estate is whether real estate is a good option to achieve financial independence fairly quickly (by age 30, is that too ambitious)?

Some relevant info:

~75k in remaining student loans (at a high interest rate of 8%)

~12k in remaining car loan

~Expect to make 130k-140k gross income

My goal is to achieve financial independence as quickly as possible. My job is not horrible but I'm not thrilled about the typical track of working until age 55+. I was wondering if anyone could offer advice about investing in real estate and more specifically:

- What would you do to balance investing in real estate (flips, rentals) vs. paying down my existing debt?

- What would be the quickest way (without a HUGE amount of risk...clearly there's risk in any investment) to achieve FI? I'm not opposed to keeping the day job to fund the real estate investments.

- I live in a high COL area (New England) so how does that affect investing strategy...Are out of state investments (either flips or rentals) out of the question?

- How much seed capital (cash) would you recommend for someone in my situation?

I would love to provide more specific information about myself if that will help. Thanks for any and all advice/encouragement you can offer!

Cheers,

Brian