Just Moved to Jersey City, NJ & Deciding What to Do Next...

[Christopher Stover]

Hi Everyone,

I purchased my first home in 2007 when I got my first job out of college. Since then, I picked up a couple more homes when moving with work and rented them after I left the area. I manage everything long-distance myself after having a bad run in with a property manager when trying to rent my first house. There are bad apples in every bunch, but for the most part, I've had great tenants and built a reliable network of people to call when things go wrong.

Initially, my goal was to buy a house every time I moved with work, which has turned out to be about every three years. However, after discovering BP last week, reading Ultimate Beginner's Guide, a few forum posts, and listening to a couple of the podcasts, I see there's a lot more I could probably be doing. In the end though, I’d like to have enough property to live comfortably through passive income (vague and without numbers, I know).

I'm going to transition my intro into asking a bit of advice and guidance from the community as well. I just relocated to Jersey City with my job, and I’d love to buy something here or in Manhattan, especially a two or three unit building. I’m interested to hear your thoughts on whether I should look to find something here or if I may be better off trying to buy something elsewhere in the country. The benefits to me of buying locally are: I’m building equity every month instead of paying rent (which I hate), I get a lower fixed, owner-occupied mortgage rate, etc. The biggest benefit that comes to mind for buying elsewhere in the country, based upon my reading over the past few days, would probably be the opportunity to buy more properties at cheaper prices resulting in higher cash flow. Each option has its pros and cons, of course, but I lean toward continuing my trend and finding something local in the Downtown, Hoboken, Newport, etc. areas that are PATH and Lightrail accessible. I look forward to hearing your thoughts and if you see things differently!

Chris