Hello! Starting out and seeking path forward

[Amber Kay]

Hello, as most of you, I'm inspired by what real estate can do and I'm hoping to get myself into for my family. My situation: I'm currently in school, no job. My husband has a w2 job and we own our primary residence together. This has most of our savings tied up. Equity is about 40-50k in our home. We have 6 months worth of emergency savings. Whats a good way to begin? Also, if we take out a heloc and use that to start out under an LLC, how can we pay ourselves back? I see all these strategies and it's exciting but very overwhelming at the very least.

[Account Closed]

Hi Amber,

My husband and I started out investing with a similar situation--though I am not in school, I am a stay-at-home mom with, obviously, no income. We own our home and had a similar amount of equity in it. You don't specify what type of investing you are considering--BRRR, flip, buy-and-hold, so I'm not sure which direction you are considering, but we started out with turn-key buy and hold through a large--and free--investors' network.

Backing up, though, I educated myself like crazy for about 6 months before I dipped my toe in. The first thing I did was read every Robert Kiyosaki (Rich Dad) book I could get my hands on, plus all the books by his Rich Dad Advisors. Then I discovered real estate podcasts. My favorites are:

*Get Rich Education with Keith Weinhold (I listened to every single one of these starting with episode 1)

*The Real Wealth Show with Kathy Fettke

*Real Estate News for Investors with Kathy Fettke

*The Real Estate Guys Radio Show

*Bigger Pockets (I actually didn't discover this one until after I'd signed the contract for our 4th property!)

We have purchased all of our investment properties (4 so far since August of last year) with conventional loans in my husband's name because: A) He is the one with income and I have debt that we didn't want considered, and B) If we put both names on the mortgage then it counts against BOTH of us and we could otherwise EACH get 10 conventional loans (assuming that someday I have an income that would qualify me for a conventional mortgage). We initially title all the properties in BOTH of our names.

LATER we formed the LLCs that we have/will move the properties into (we have an umbrella policy to cover them before we move them). We take the cash-flow out (after paying all the bills and factoring in 5% each for vacancy and maintenance) as quarterly "capital distributions" to "pay ourselves back" which, in our case, means we just reinvest that into the next property since we're trying to grow our portfolio as quickly as possible.

Hope that give you some ideas to get started!

Good luck on your journey!