Owner Occupied 4 plex, can we do it?

[Kyle Allen]

Little about ourselves, my wife and I are both 21, she works full time and I work part time and attend college full time (BS Mechanical Engineering), combined we make roughly 50k a year, I have no student debt, all is payed out of pocket, and I have about 25% of my degree left (2 years) we have a little bit of CC debt (3k used, about 20k available combined) and I have a car loan from before we got married with around 12K left on it. We are currently renting at about $1000 a month (about as low as you can go for our area). We are interested in Owner occupied rentals for many reasons, one of which is being able to live rent free. From the research that i've done, I would like to go the route of an FHA with 3.5% down. I know this is not ideal and we would also have to pay mortgage insurance, but because we are young and don't have the kind of savings for 20-25%, we feel like this is the best option for our first property. Our leverage here would be the fact that since we are owner occupying the 4 plex, we can count the other 3 units as income to get the loan.

Now my question: Is this a pipe dream or is it possible on 50k/per wage to get a FHA loan on 3.5% down using the other 3 units to leverage our income so we could get the loan. Average 4 plex's here are 350k-450k, average rents are $1000 to $1200 for 2 bed 1 ba.

If this is a pipe dream, what can we do to make this a reality.

Thank you, 

Kyle