Let me know If my plan is dumb.

[Jeremy Godwin]

A little bit about me first, I am 24 years old married with 1 child and I love finance and managing money my mom is a realtor and broker and she was my inspiration partly to get into real estate. I followed Dave Ramsey Before I found Robert kiyosaki so I got completely out of debt and learned how to manage my money before I started reading about leveraging my money.

All that being said I am currently living in Mckinney Tx, I have a house I just purchased with a VA loan, I am a paramedic and, make enough money for me and my family to live comfortably on my salary alone, My wife makes about 34k per year and we are able to save all of that. we just finished saving our first 30k so my plan is to use that as my bank reserves then every 1-2 years from now on buy a house with a 20% or more down payment each time. from what I have seen any rental property within 30 miles of Dallas rents out for about 400-600 per room, example a 3 bedroom house always gets close to 1500$ monthly. I figure if I can put enough money down on a property to keep my mortgage and taxes under 1000$ I can make a 400-600$ profit on each house I buy.

my goal is financial independence and Ideally cash flow of about 4,500 would be more than enough. So the benefit I have with my mom as a realtor and broker is that I can use her as a property manager and I get to use the MLS system to find deals. I feel like I am just being a dreamer and need to be smacked back into reality so by all means help me but with my current plan if it works out I should be able to technically retire by 35ish.

[Tyler Hodgson]

Hey Jeremy. Welcome to the BP forums. It sounds like you have a good general idea of where you are and where you want to go. Thanks for your service. I too am a veteran in the DFW area.

A little bit about me: I'm 25 years old. I currently have roommates in my primary residence that I got this year with a VA loan. I own a 50% interest in two rental properties with my business partner. We both went in on it completely 50/50 (50% cash required and 50% of profits). I am finishing up my Master's degree in Accounting at UNT and working on my CPA exams. My current full-time job is a Loan Officer for a local lender. I can help you with any financing questions you have.

Back to you: You are in a great position right now with your low debt, chunk of savings, and livable salary. You also have a wonderful resource that your mother is a realtor and probably has great expertise in helping you find some strong cash-flowing rental properties, and if she is willing to manage these properties at no or little cost that will help out tremendously.

It sounds like your next steps are to continue learning and doing research and getting ready to take action when the opportunity arises. Personally, I stumbled upon my first rental opportunity while searching for my primary residence and I just had to jump on it! 

Start finding some potential deals and analyze them. BP has some good calculators for analysis, and there is a specific forum topic just for deal analysis where you can receive the advice of others.

Remember:  Rent  -  Mortgage (plus taxes & insurance); does not = profit. Price in the management fees, repairs & maintenance, vacancy, and capital expenditures (large costs).

Good luck. Again, please reach out if you have any questions!