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

[Jay Hinrichs]

@Brian Cook  DO NOT QUIT your job it would take you years to net those kind of dollars in most markets.

and if you have no cash you need to start putting capital together.. I would take a completely different tac. last thing I would do is buy small rentals one at a time.. what is 200 a month cash flow going to do for you...

put some cash together and your nice paying job and credit which you probably have and start to look for some local partners that are doing bigger deals and are looking for partners.  be very cautious as you vette them.. but you should be able to get into leveraged deals were your consistently making 50 to 100% or more on your cash.. do that for enough years then start to peel into cash flow units once you have a few hundred grand saved up and you just use a little of that... and or invest with a group and buy repositioning properties that have major upside.. don't get bogged down buying small rentals that have no upside its just way to slow of a way for someone like you to get to where you want to be if your smart enough at 25 to be knocking down 135k a year ) that puts you in the top 3% of all wage earners already... keep focused on that.. remember RE is just not that easy to duplicate those numbers without serious value add..

those at buy smaller rentals are looking for a 10 to 30 year plan... and they plan on keeping their day job...