New to investing, any help is appreciated

[Vincent Harris]

Hello BP. This is my first post as I am a newbie to this site. 

I currently work full time, and after spending countless months deciding what avenue i would like to life to go i decided i would like to learn more about real estate. I have been doing all my real estate research on blogs, books, podcasts, websites and the BP forum. I finally decided to make a post. 

This is something that i am very serious about, I tend to try my hardest when a challenging task is at hand. My main goal is to get into the multi family dwelling business. I feel that has some of the greatest returns monthly for my investment. I would like to buy and hold. Eventually making enough money to either pay the homes off or use that profit towards other investments. Long term goals are to produce more income for when i retire and to eventually be able to quit my job and focus full time on investing. 

I currently own the home that i am living in and i feel that i am in the perfect situation to begin investing due to the fact that i have tons of equity on the house and currently have an open HELOC on the house. My HELOC loan is in the ball park of about 90k. One of my holdups is i am not sure if i should put small down payments on numerous real estate purchases or a big down payment on one big real estate purchase.

I live in northern California and it is very expensive to live out here so i know it will be very difficult to invest and actually make a profit and make it worth my time, so i have been researching purchasing out of state. 

I guess my main question to the Bigger Pockets world is where should i start with the money i have?